SUMMARYThe Internet, Web 2.0 and Social Networking technologies are enabling citizens to actively participate in 'citizen science' projects by contributing data to scientific programmes via the Web. However, the limited training, knowledge and expertise of contributors can lead to poor quality, misleading or even malicious data being submitted. Subsequently, the scientific community often perceive citizen science data as not worthy of being used in serious scientific research-which in turn, leads to poor retention rates for volunteers. In this paper, we describe a technological framework that combines data quality improvements and trust metrics to enhance the reliability of citizen science data. We describe how online social trust models can provide a simple and effective mechanism for measuring the trustworthiness of community-generated data. We also describe filtering services that remove unreliable or untrusted data and enable scientists to confidently reuse citizen science data. The resulting software services are evaluated in the context of the CoralWatch project-a citizen science project that uses volunteers to collect comprehensive data on coral reef health.

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The Health-e-Waterways Project is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between the University of Queensland

The Health-e-Waterways Project is a collaboration between the University of Queensland, Microsoft Research and the South East Queensland Healthy Waterways Partnership (SEQ-HWP) (a consortium of over 60 local government, state agency, universities, community and environmental organizations). The aim of the project is to develop a highly innovative framework and set of services to enable streamlined access to a collection of real-time, near-real-time and static datasets acquired through ecosystem health monitoring programs (EHMP) in South East Queensland. This paper describes the underlying water information management system and Web Portal that we are developing to enable the sharing and integration of the high quality data and models for SEQ water resource managers. In addition we will describe the interactive and dynamic ecosystem reporting services that we have developed and the WaterWiki that is being established to enable knowledge exchange between the online community of Queensland's water stakeholders.

The Health-e-Waterways Project is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between the University of Queensland