A brief introduction to Open Data, Open Source Software and Collective Intelligence for environmental data creators and users
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ethical Issues, Legal Issues, Science Policy, Spatial and Geographic Information Science
- Keywords
- open data, open source software, collective intelligence, openstreetmap, crowdsourcing
- Copyright
- © 2018 Hengl et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. A brief introduction to Open Data, Open Source Software and Collective Intelligence for environmental data creators and users. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27127v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27127v2
Abstract
Using the term "Open data" has become a bit of a fashion, but using it without clear specifications is misleading i.e. it can be considered just an empty phrase. Probably even worse is the term "Open Science" — can science be NOT open at all? Are we reinventing something that should be obvious from start? This guide tries to clarify some key aspects of Open Data, Open Source Software and Crowdsourcing using examples of projects and business. It aims at helping you understand and appreciate complexity of Open Data, Open Source software and Open Access publications. It was specifically written for producers and users of environmental data, however, the guide will likely be useful to any data producers and user.
Author Comment
We have updated some broken links, added few more up-to-date references and added a half page disclaimer.