The OpenStreetMaps model is also interesting. Where they basically only provide the data and expect others to make Apps/Websites
That said, it's also interesting that there hasn't been any big hit with people building new apps on top of Wikidata (I guess the website and Android app are technically different views on the same thing)
Frankly, I think the reason people haven’t built apps on top of Wikidata is that the data there isn’t very useful.
I say this not to diss Wikimedia, as the Wikipedia project itself is great and an amazing tool and resource. But Wikidata is simply not there.
But I tried to do some Wikidata queries for stuff like: what are all the neighborhoods and districts of Hong Kong, all the counties in Taiwan, and it's piecemeal coverage, tags different from one entity to another, not everything in a group is linked to OSM. It's not a lot of improvement over Wikipedia's Category pages.
A big part of that is that different language editions of wikipedia are very decoupled. One of the goals of wikidata was to share data between different language wikipedias. It needed to be decoupled so it was equal to all the different languages.
A year or so ago someone asked Reddit for examples of how iNaturalist is used by scientists. I go on Google Scholar and it's papers about crowdsourcing, community, classrooms. I didn't see papers where the data was part of researching the plants and animals (knowing where to study, unexpected sightings, changes over time) like Budburst. Maybe biologists are doing that off the record and I'm 100% wrong, but it shook my perception that these are observations and I should upload yet another desert gecko sighting.
iNaturalist is sometimes used by our ecologists/biologists as a starting point for collating occurrence data.
The iNaturalist data itself is likely specifically being pulled from gbif. Then they go private/specialty databases that have more spatially and taxonomically accurate records.
But iNaturalist data is often not considered high quality enough to be publishable by itself (wide brush statement) in my field of plant conservation.
We've tried to have some conversations with iNaturalist and they weren't really interest in talking, gave me pause on what their motives as an organization are.
But conservation tools are few and far between, and iNaturalist is a really powerful tool for initial data exploration.
As an example from the list, "Aedes albopictus Is Rapidly Invading Its Climatic Niche in France: Wider Implications for Biting Nuisance and Arbovirus Control in Western Europe" [3] cites 5348 iNaturalist records.
[1] https://www.gbif.org/literature-tracking
[2] https://www.gbif.org/resource/search?contentType=literature&...
[3] Paper https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.70414 citing GBIF data download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.gzdq3f
PS we are recruiting an engineer, but the deadline for this position is today: https://gbif.link/senior-data-engineer
I should add the asterisk that my anecdotes on the presumed legitimacy of publishing solely iNaturalist data comes from conversations I've had in the American endangered/threatened plant conservation community. More common or non-American species occurrence data from iNaturalist likely has more legitimacy being used directly in publications.
In the US we have a series of government/NGO controlled databases that house sensitive species data, so often our scientific community has to operate through them to get access to publishable information (of which the raw data is then often obscured, just used for analytics). In my experience iNaturalist data is often a good starting place for determining which government bodies/NGOs a biologist should start reaching out for requesting data access.
I love GBIF and have a priority this year of making sure that my organization plugs-in what we're willing to share via IPT or Biocase!
As someone who recently started using iNaturalist, I've been curious about this. I think it's an awesome platform and really cool that people can share what they find, etc, but I noticed that people would pile on with species-level IDs on pictures that were obviously ambiguous between different species known to exist in the vicinity.
I of course want as much data as possible to be available to science, but it piqued my interest about whether a negative feedback loop of misidentifications to future identification models could form.
It's a massive dataset. There's nothing quite like it. The way people collaborate and verify information on iNat is invaluable.
The best thing about iNat is the passionate people on there. If you don't know an ID, just post it and within a day someone will correct it. It's crazy.
Download Seek and go try it out. Make sure to sign up for iNat and connect your seek to iNat so you can contribute.
I‘ve moved to the main iNaturalist app, and it does everything Seek does, but better and it’s generally also faster.
It is more than one organisation, but rather a central org + a network of regional organisations. The regional organisation provides a lot of biological technical expertise. Citizen scientists alone would not be able to correctly handle the complex taxonomic issues you have in biology… or even basic identification in many cases.
Where the organisation(s) sometimes go awry, in my personal opinion, is forgetting they are the custodian of citizen science data, not the source of it.