Bespoke tools and workflow design Sample Clauses

Bespoke tools and workflow design. The Zooniverse Panoptes platform provides a number of standard tools for image analysis, from classification-type question tasks to annotation-type drawing tools for simple measurements, which have been understandably developed to cover as wide a range of scientific questions and disciplines as feasible. As such, they might not be appropriate for the measurement of more complex features as those found on the surface of Mars. To address this issue, the Zooniverse has made their code available through the GitHub source code hosting service. From here, any scientist or science team can download and create their own instance of the Zooniverse locally, and therefore have complete access to edit and adapt code as required. This means that not only can bespoke tools tailored to the specific science case be developed, but also the workflow itself (the way the tools and tasks are presented) can be adapted - for instance changing the task after a set number of images, or having different citizen scientist groups do different tasks etc. Once created this platform can then be tested or launched on the local machine or a configured server, however to be included on the Zooniverse server as an endorsed project any adaptations of the code have to be approved by the Zooniverse development team. An example of this process, created as part of WP7 of the iMars project, has been uploaded to the GitHub system (see 5.1). Specifically a new version of the Zooniverse’s Planet Four has been adapted to analyse craters on the surface of Mars, with a new ‘elliptical’ tool developed to mark secondary impacts and 3 different workflows created to investigate the effect on volunteer performance and engagement of differing tools and tasks. As this work was completed towards the beginning of the iMars project (mid-2014), the Panoptes predecessor, Ouroboros, was used but the procedure has not changed significantly (a link to the GitHub repository for Panoptes including installation instructions can be found in 5.1).