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How important is natural light? Which kind of negative effects can excess light inflicts on the natural environment? How many species are affected by light pollution?
Light pollution is a serious thing, with enormous negative effects on the environment, the economy, and the population. It as been scientifically proven, for instance, that human pathologies such as insomnia or stress can be related to light
excess.
Experts on the topic are confident that light pollution matters and it has to be drastically reduced. High-level organisations share this worry. The United Nations named the 2015 the International Year of Light in order to foster the debate on the topic improving citizens’ awareness.
Building on the relevancy of the topic, STARS4ALL is in the first line to fight against light pollution. STARS4ALL is creating a structured community of people aware of the problem and ready to fight against it. The community will be created through the engagement of all potentially interested people, from amateurs to experts, in activities such as games, seminars, events and the streaming of astronomical events.
We all live under the same sky, so why don’t share the same community?
Description of the outcome
Cleaning data set and have fun while doing it: citizens science and gaming
With the rise of big and linked data and knowledge graphs, the need becomes compelling to find suitable solutions to increase the coverage and correctness of datasets, to add missing knowledge and to identify and remove errors.
The GWAP Enabler, this is the name of this tool, is an open source software framework that allows to design and development of Games With A Purpose in the form of web applications to solve linked data refinement issues. The GWAP Enabler addresses specific data linking “purposes” (creation, ranking and validation of links) by embedding the respective crowdsourcing tasks to achieve those goals within the gameplay.
Following the tutorial and modifying the source code, it is possible to develop a Game with a Purpose to collect and validate data from/with citizen scientists so that the experience developed by the Stars4All project about air pollution could be applied to other fields.
What you need to use it
The ideal user of this output is a software developer, he/she will need development and deployment environment (MySQL, PHP, Apache Web server). The tutorial is available here: https://github.com/STARS4ALL/gwap-enabler-tutorial
Do you want to contribute?
The source code and related information is available here: https://github.com/STARS4ALL/gwap-enabler
Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPSSI) is manage by the Coordination and Support Action CHiC project which is funded under Grant Agreement No. 687686 by the European Commission.