• Design, develop and implement a people-centric observation web offered in the form of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)-compliant web services and resources to the GEOSS portal.
• Develop the innovative Scent crowd-sourcing platform to collect image as well as textual information from citizens; as a result, this will extend the in-situ infrastructure with citizen-sourced observations.
• Implement the Scent intelligence engine, which will use innovative machine learning techniques to classify and annotate images and text sourced from citizens as well as existing open platforms.
• Design and develop a serious gaming application to annotate unutilised images from popular open platforms, e.g. Flickr and Panoramio, as complementary data sources on land-cover and land-use changes.
• Quantify the impact of land-cover/use changes to flood risk maps and spatio-temporal flooding patterns.
• Design a simple authoring tool for policy makers to customise the Scent toolbox according to target group, regional or social characteristics.
• Test, evaluate and validate the Scent smart toolbox in two large scale pilots of great environmental impact; the urban case of the Kifisos river in Attica and the rural case of the Danube Delta.
• Increase the active engagement of citizens as individuals, citizen associations as well as local authorities in monitoring their environment through the creation of a citizen movement.

The citizen-centric and participatory Scent methodology is divided into three phases:

• The requirements and architecture design phase includes a study and analysis of user requirements and needs for a sustainable and active citizen observatory.
• The technical development and innovation phase consists of the design, research, development and implementation of innovative tools and solutions that make up the Scent toolbox.
• The integration and large scale demonstration phase involves integrating the solution and ensuring through formal testing that Scent toolbox components are interoperable and fully functional. In this phase, two large scale pilots will be carried out to evaluate and validate the Scent citizen observatory.

Scent participates in the Pilot on Open Research Data launched by the European Commission along with the Horizon 2020 programme.

The Open Research Data Pilot aims to improve and maximise access to and re-use of research data generated by Horizon 2020 projects. It takes into account the need to balance openness and protection of scientific information, commercialisation and Intellectual Property Rights, privacy concerns, security as well as data management and preservation questions. While open access to research data thereby becomes applicable by default in Horizon 2020, the Commission also recognises that there are good reasons to keep some or even all research data generated in a project closed. The Commission therefore provides robust opt-out possibilities at any stage.

The Scent consortium supports open science and the large potential benefits to the European innovation and economy stemming from allowing reusing data at a larger scale. The majority of data produced in the project may therefore be published with open access.

Scent aims to demonstrate the huge potential of an active citizen observatory that will complement existing infrastructure through the Scent toolbox. It will lead to a significant pool of observations on changes in land cover and related environmental phenomena. Data will be fed via web services into existing repositories, such as the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) portal. Scent will provide policy-makers with a near real-time view of land-use changes while directly involving citizens in the decision-making process.

The Scent concept is built around three pillars:

Pillar I: Increased involvement of citizens in the process of land cover and land use monitoring through a set of participatory solutions

Pillar II: Better use of available data, repositories and monitoring systems through innovative tools and algorithms

Pillar III: Development of a co-design strategy, involving both citizens and public authorities with the aim of creating a sustainable citizen observatory

Illustration of the Scent Toolbox

The impact of the project will be felt in many ways, especially in the environmental, societal, technical and industrial field.

Environmental
Citizens often feel that their efforts won’t have much impact on environmental policies and climate change. Scent will show that citizens in fact can have a real impact in environmental monitoring and identification of flood risks.

Major environmental agencies and decision-makers have agreed to promote the project outcomes, which will guarantee EU-wide environmental impact.

Societal
Scent will foster innovation and create jobs in SMEs, which will help fight unemployment in Europe.

Scent will also improve the accuracy of existing flood risk maps by more than 15% and thus make areas close to floodplains less vulnerable to disasters.

Scent promotes an open method of coordinating environmental policies. It will include regional environmental groups, public-private partnerships and citizen communities in land-use monitoring, which will encourage innovative governance schemes.

Technical
Scent will bring about new technological developments and products through the SCENT toolbox, and citizens’ contributions to environmental data will be fed directly into the Scent intelligence engine. These will be key in generating precise and up-to-date land-use maps and flood risk maps for decision-makers.

Scent will also extend the GEOSS and Copernicus repositories through frequent updates of local monitoring of land-use changes using the Scent Toolbox.

Industrial
Scent will introduce low-cost state-of-the-art tools that will encourage further innovation and boost the development of new people-centric apps, products and services.

The Scent observatory will promote Europe in the global environmental monitoring market. Citizen engagement will foster the creation of new SMEs and boost innovation in current European SMEs. Scent will reveal an untapped potential for the gaming industry and the crowd-sourcing and social media industries to enter the environmental field.