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Technology Infrastructure

A professional and maintained IT Infrastructure builds the backbone of all Citizen Science and Public Participation in digital Apps.

Running interactive and user-driven applications requires a reliable, secure, high-performance technical infrastructure. When using Apps and digital tools, we do not like to wait, and our personal data, contributions, and activities must be safe. All projects on the SPOTTERON platform run on a specialized cloud-based IT system for Citizen Science and Community Engagement, built by our professional system architects and developers for optimal performance.

Reliability, Resilience, and Performance

A solid and reliable IT infrastructure for interactive software applications ensures a quality user experience and ongoing performance. Even hundreds or thousands of people participating actively in an App on a regular basis should not slow things down. Spikes in user activity and downloads can occur when, e.g., media coverage is reporting about your project or when special events occur. With our scalable data services, the SPOTTERON platform can handle concurrent user activity dynamically, even on a massive scale. The SPOTTERON technology infrastructure builds the backbone for every Citizen Science And user Engagement App on the platform, enabling a hassle-free runtime for national or international projects. Additional security layers of the cloud providers protect against attacks and keep the data safe.

SPOTTERON Chart: App IT Infrastructure for Citizen Science


The SPOTTERON IT Technology Infrastructure ensures high performance in a privacy-respecting and optimized environment. Interchained technology services for project components, from the Project Website to interactive Applications, enable user interaction and the integration of project tools for scientific or community-engagement workflows.

Constant maintenance and monitoring

Like the publicly accessible Apps and Tools themselves, the IT infrastructure powering all applications on the platform is constantly maintained by our team. Our team stands ready in case of emergencies, or IT attacks to reduce risks and address emerging technical issues without delay. Monitoring and performance alert systems guarantee service availability and ensure everything runs as expected.

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Focus on ethical service providers and privacy standards

Designing the IT infrastructure for Citizen Science and Public Engagement Apps is about making choices resulting in better user privacy protection, improved digital ethics, and a less surveillance-based digital landscape. On SPOTTERON, we make this choice a core of our system design, focusing on data ethics and high-level privacy standards for participants and project administrators.

Technology Infrastructure Features

Data Storage

Secure and unlimited storage of data, user contributions, and media objects for your project

Map-Servers

Quality Map Severs for different map styles in a privacy-respecting environment

Webhosting

Professional Webhosting with unlimited traffic/web-space for project websites and browser-based tools

Backups

Daily automated data backups for data safety, data loss prevention, and resilience

Monitoring

Automated monitoring systems are in place to ensure stable performance and availability

Push Service

Service for user notification and project messages with push functionality on smartphones

Search and Indexing

Servers for high-performance data indexing, data accessibility, and data outputs

Taxonomy System

Data servers for providing taxonomy data outputs based on live Wikidata integration

With the SPOTTERON Technology Infrastructure optimized for user interaction, performance and reliability, we provide a quality IT environment for all kinds of Citizen Science and Public Participation projects no matter what scope - from regional to international participation in EU Horizon Europe or other large-scale science funding programs to global Citizen Science Apps.

Short News

  • A new paper titled "Citizen Science Approaches for Water Quality Measurements" has been published by the scientists behind CrowdWater. Find it in the papers section!

    in Shortnews
  • A new paper from the Horizon 2020 project IPM titled "Genetic variability of Metarhizium isolates from the Ticino Valley Natural Park (Northern Italy) as a possible microbiological resource for the management of Popillia japonica" has been added to our page. Find this and other Citizen Science related publications on the SPOTTERON Papers & Publications section.

    in Shortnews