CS4CS technical documentation
Introduction
CS4CS stands for Citizen Science for Citizen Science. It refers to a crowd sourcing and thinking project that aims to create an inventory of citizen science projects.
As of october 15 2013, we released a first Beta version (0.1). We would like to reach a somewhat stable version by mid-november 2013.
CS4CS is embedded in EduTechWiki and accessible through a central hub page, called portal: citizen science
Participation
Signing up
Anyone can participate. However, since EduTechWiki is subject to heavy spamming attacks you will have to go through the somewhat tedious registration procedure.
Once you got an account, you either can create new entries for projects, infrastructure and software, or you can modify existing entries.
Editing existing entries
Unlike in a traditional wiki page, editing is done through forms, using the Edit with form button that appears on top of wiki pages that use Semantic Forms.
If you want to add information that can't be entered through the forms, you can do so using the "free text" field at the end.
Once you are done editing, scroll down and hit the Save page button.
Help us to improve CS4CS
You also can make suggestions regarding the forms and the visual display through the following three discussion pages:
- Comment/discuss the project form
- Comment/discuss the infrastructure form
- Comment discuss the software form
Use the the following discussion page for general questions
Implementation
CS4CS was implemented using Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) plus various SMW externsions, in particular Semantic Forms.
Wiki CS4CS article types
We used the following templates and forms (look at the source code of these, if you are technically minded, contributing users do not need to know....)
| Entry types | Form | Template | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Citizen science projects | form:Citizen science project | template:Citizen science project | |
| Citizen science infrastructure | form:Citizen science infrastructure | template:Citizen science infrastructure | |
| Citizen science software | form:Citizen science software | template:Citizen science software | |
| Bibliography item | form:BibliographyForm | template:Bibliography | This template is embedded in the citizen science projects form |
Query forms
In addition, we will use so-called filters and query templates. As of Oct 15 2013, these are not yet implemented...
Test: Special:RunQuery/Citizen_science_project_query, using the Form:Citizen science project query and the template:Citizen science project query
Queries
Semantic MediaWiki information can be queried in various forms. E.g. see the "canned" queries that use Semantic Result Formats for rendering by looking at the source of the portal: citizen science page.
Otherwise, you also can type in queries, using the Special:Ask page. E.g. try something like this:
Of course, in order to formulate queries you need to know semantic properties. One way to see these, is to look at the properties that are listed at the end of each CS4CS entry. An other one would be some decent documentation which we don't provide so far ...
API
It is possible to retrieve information via the MediaWiki API.