QuestaGame

[AfriBats]

Hi everyone

Just stumbled across this observation
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/2807612

and noticed that it was contributed via an app called QuestaGame, which led me to their project site
http://portal.questagame.com

That project nowhere mentions iNat and I wondered what the link b/w QuestaGame and iNat is.

Jakob

[Carrie Seltzer]

Interesting! That observation is gone now, but here's a username and their iNat app:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/questagame

https://www.inaturalist.org/oauth/applications/111 (created just 6 days ago!)

Go here and then arrow over a couple for more about who is involved: http://portal.questagame.com/#banner6

I joined and submitted two observations, one which showed up on iNat under the questagame user account and one that didn't. Here's the one that did: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/2808723 The other was a skink. I wonder if they are sending data to different places based on taxa and location.

Looks like their observations then get verified here: http://bee.questagame.com/

I wonder how iNaturalist figures into their workflow? I just got my own observation to pop up there by skipping a few.

I totally got sucked into trying to figure this out and now I need to get on with my day. I'm done! Hope my explorations are interesting or helpful. Maybe the developers are Google group lurkers and want to chime in?

Carrie

[Charlie Hohn]

interesting, it looks like a super gamified citizen science aggregator of some sort. If authorized and it works with our community it could be neat... if not it could be awful... interesting indeed

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Charlie Hohn
Montpelier, Vermont

[James Bailey]

Oh yeah I remember seeing that when it was restricted to Australia.

Strange site. I think it already submits to Atlas of Living Australia and GBIF.

[Kyle Copas]

I don't know much more about the game than what's here—http://devpost.com/software/questagame—and nothing about any iNat connection. 

But just to confirm: yes, the data do come into GBIF via ALA: http://collections.ala.org.au/public/show/dr1902

And potentially iNat now, too.

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Weysesgade 43

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(+45) 28 75 14 75 | skype kylecopas

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 3:39 AM, 'James Bailey' via iNaturalist <inatu...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Oh yeah I remember seeing that when it was restricted to Australia.

Strange site. I think it already submits to Atlas of Living Australia and GBIF.

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[Donald Hobern]

I've been serving as a back-up identifier for some of the moth records that have been submitted to QuestaGame in Australia, but have little knowledge of what's going on with the global application.  I've emailed a contact within QuestaGame to see if they have any input to make to this discussion.

Donald

[James Bailey]

Seems redundant to transfer Questagame to GBIF via ALA if they also want to transfer to iNaturalist (which will in turn transfer to GBIF and ALA too).

Easiest mediating point might be if they just transfer to iNat, which drops the sightings to ALA and GBIF when they get research grade. But maybe the research grade barrier will put them off given how the software seems to function.

[Carrie Seltzer]

I received an email last night that my moss observation had been identified (via their site http://bee.questagame.com/) and now it's no longer on iNaturalist, so there doesn't appear to be persistent redundancy since iNat seems to be only a temporary stop for a subset of their data. Do hope they chime in. Glad you reached out to them, Donald!

Carrie

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 11:29 AM, 'James Bailey' via iNaturalist <inatu...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Seems redundant to transfer Questagame to GBIF via ALA if they also want to transfer to iNaturalist (which will in turn transfer to GBIF and ALA too).

Easiest mediating point might be if they just transfer to iNat, which drops the sightings to ALA and GBIF when they get research grade. But maybe the research grade barrier will put them off given how the software seems to function.

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[Donald Hobern]

That's definitely not a good way to use iNaturalist - parasitically.

Donald

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[AfriBats]

That's definitely not a good way to use iNaturalist - parasitically.

Donald

If that should be the case - a pipeline with only temporary presence of observations on iNat - I would strongly favour blocking their use of iNat.

Best, Jakob

[Charlie Hohn]

Agreed. If they aren't going to remain part of the community they shouldn't be using us for IDs. Also imho they need to have different user names for different users (even if naturalist124 or whatever) rather than one huge account for all of them. 

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[Scott Loarie]

I agree with the points mentioned in this thread, i.e.

1. persistent rather than temporary posting of data

2. different users rather than a lumped account

3. links back to iNat and acknowledgment of the iNat community

as necessary conditions for integration with iNat

anything else we're forgetting?

--------------------------------------------------
Scott R. Loarie, Ph.D.
Co-director, iNaturalist.org
California Academy of Sciences
55 Music Concourse Dr
San Francisco, CA 94118
--------------------------------------------------

[Charlie Hohn]

i'd recommend they also create a project or journal entry or something and link all of their profiles to it... with a summary of what QuestaGame is... otherwise it's kinda weird. Maybe they are just 'testing' it but still. I also find it disappointing if they did not engage with curators, admins, and other members of the iNat community before linking in. That isn't a dealbreaker, but kind of odd.

[James Bailey]

Was going to sign up to see what it was about, but the website sign in button does not work apparently on any of my PCs or browsers. The button is redundant and nothing happens when you click on it. Hm,

[Scott Loarie]

Argh - I just accidentally ID'd a questgame observation

http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/2816788

really is unsatisfying if they are indeed deleting these as soon as they get ID'd

Lets put a deadline on hearing from the developers before we block that app. Should we say 2 weeks after we reach out to the developers? Donald did you succeed in reaching out to the developers? If you're to busy, let me know and I can try to track them down and send an email.

Thanks,

Scott

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 4:57 PM, 'James Bailey' via iNaturalist <inatu...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Was going to sign up to see what it was about, but the website sign in button does not work apparently on any of my PCs or browsers. The button is redundant and nothing happens when you click on it. Hm,

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[MR]

Hi All,

Donald Hobern alerted me to this discussion. Thank you for this feedback. It's exactly the sort of discussion we're keen to work through. In fact, we’ve just begun experimenting with some public APIs - including iNaturalist, BowerBird and others - as a way to avoid QuestaGame experts and players having to log into multiple systems.

To clarify your key points: 

>> 1. persistent rather than temporary posting of data

This is not a problem. We only did this to avoid duplicate records on GBIF during this learning phase, but it's not a problem for us to leave the sightings on iNat. We just need 1-2 days so we can update our internal scripts. 

>> 2. different users rather than a lumped account

This is possible. It adds a layer of complexity, but could be a really good solution. We'll look into how this might work.

>> 3. links back to iNat and acknowledgment of the iNat community

Of course, not a problem.

Please bear with us as we try to figure out what’s possible - and not possible - with these codes. We’ve received some wonderful comments from iNaturalist users which is much appreciated. QuestaGame is 100% aligned with the goals of citizen science programs such as iNaturalist and will do whatever it can to promote better collaboration as a means to increase the quantity and quality of species observations on GBIF.

Thanks in advance for your help on this.

Kind regards,
Mallika
QuestaGame

[Ken-ichi]

>>> 1. persistent rather than temporary posting of data
> This is not a problem. We only did this to avoid duplicate records on GBIF
> during this learning phase, but it's not a problem for us to leave the
> sightings on iNat. We just need 1-2 days so we can update our internal
> scripts.

GBIF folks: is there a DwC-A field that can be used to avoid
duplication when identical records are present in multiple
"collections" and datasets? institutionCode, collectionCode, and
catalogNumber don't seem appropriate, since a record in iNat will have
iNat values for these fields, even if it originated from another
database like questabird or ALA. I realize this is the (very) old UUID
/ GUID / LSID problem, but I'm wondering if you guys have an approach
you've chosen.

-ken-ichi

[Scott Loarie]

Hi Mallika,

Thanks very much for chiming in. Sounds like you are doing some very cool things with gameifying natural history with Questagame and this could be a very cool collaboration. 

Very much appreciate your offer to tweak a few things with the interface between the systems.

>>> 1. persistent rather than temporary posting of data
>>This is not a problem.

Great - it might also be good to wrap the observations you are posting within a project. This will make it easier for the iNat community to find them in the Questagame context. 

This is generally how similar collaborations are operating:

http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/iseahorse -> http://iseahorse.org/

http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/national-geographic-great-nature-project -> http://greatnatureproject.org/

http://tatzpiteva.org.il/#/ -> http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/tatzpiteva

http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/l-a-nature-map -> https://www.nhm.org/nature/map/

posting project observations through the iNat API is documented here: http://www.inaturalist.org/pages/api+reference#post-project_observations

>>> 2. different users rather than a lumped account
>> This is possible. It adds a layer of complexity, but could be a really good solution. We'll look into how this might work.

This would be huge. The iNat community is really about peer - to - peer communication, so as long as you're having questagam participants register with unique accounts, it would be technically very simple to post their obs with analogous distinct user accounts: http://www.inaturalist.org/pages/api+reference#post-users

>>> 3. links back to iNat and acknowledgment of the iNat community
>> Of course, not a problem.

We'd love to see links back to the iNat representation of the observation from Questagame and some explanation of the contribution the iNat community is playing, that would be great. But also, it would be great if there was a way on the Questagame app for comments from the iNat community to be posted back through Questagame and some way for the Questagame participants to respond. For example, when ID'ing obs I often ask questions such as "did you find this under a rock?" which help me provide IDs. It would be really nice to know that whoever posted the observation on the Questagame end is recieving my questions and has the tools to respond.

We really appreciate your working with us to tweak the interface between the sites. Sounds like this could be a very neat example of cross-site collaboration. Happy to bear with you and your team as you work on these tweaks, but it would be great if you could post a rough plan and timeline to the group of the changes being made.

Thanks very much,

Scott

[Donald Hobern]

Hi Ken-ichi.

We recognise this as a much more general problem (duplicate samples in different herbaria from the same collected plant; GenBank sequences for specimens; specimens and associated literature).  In the next year or so, I would like GBIF to get as far as clustering sets of occurrences which are presumed to be related (same date and location and species) - much as the ALA does.  At that point, I hope that we could add value by connecting up some of these things that are scattered.

I suggest that it may help for QuestaGame to include the URI for the iNaturalist record using the DwC otherCatalogNumbers property ("A list (concatenated and separated) of previous or alternate fully qualified catalog numbers or other human-used identifiers for the same Occurrence, whether in the current or any other data set or collection.").  That would certainly facilitate a more confident linkage between the "duplicates".

Donald

[Charlie Hohn]

Awesome! Great to hear. An added side effect of this all would also be inat users trying questa. I will check it out at some point. 

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[QuestaGame]

Thanks for your note, Ken-ichi. I assume this is the best place to discuss. Hi everyone.

As a temporary solution, is there some other option besides “delete” that QGame could use via the iNaturalist API - e.g. “noGBIF”? Maybe we missed it in the documentation?

QGame has a “noGBIF” tag that we use for certain low quality images, or to prevent duplicates.

We thought perhaps we could just use QGame’s “noGBIF” tag for the obs, and then leave the obs on iNat forever, but this would raise an attribution issue for the submitter. So perhaps some sort of “noGBIF” tag on iNat would make the most sense? Then the obs can just remain on iNat.

Thanks everyone for your understanding as we explore solutions. Keen to see what comes out of this.

Andrew

QuestaGame

Donald

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[Scott Loarie]

Hi Andrew,

Rather than us making a change on the iNat end to how observations are submitted to GBIF, how about following Donald Hobern @ gbif's advice above that QuestaGame "include the URI for the iNaturalist record using the DwC otherCatalogNumbers property ("A list (concatenated and separated) of previous or alternate fully qualified catalog numbers or other human-used identifiers for the same Occurrence, whether in the current or any other data set or collection.").  That would certainly facilitate a more confident linkage between the "duplicates".

That way GBIF will have the information to link the QuestaGame and iNat version of the records down the road

Scott

Donald

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[James Bailey]

To be fair, how much coding time does it take to have a check/uncheck for submitting to GBIF on our end? I guess it technically already exists in terms of observations that don't get research grade. I don't know anything about the site's coding so I may be completely wrong in my assumption, though.

James

[Donald Hobern]

From GBIF's side, we'd rather just get all the records and then deal with deduplication on our side. There is less risk then that we never see them at all.

Thanks,

Donald

On Wed, 23 Mar 2016, 1:26 a.m. 'James Bailey' via iNaturalist, <inatu...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

To be fair, how much coding time does it take to have a check/uncheck for submitting to GBIF on our end? I guess it technically already exists in terms of observations that don't get research grade. I don't know anything about the site's coding so I may be completely wrong in my assumption, though.

James

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[QuestaGame]

Hmm, still not sure this resolves the attribution issue. We think it needs more consideration. 

We’ve disabled the API feed for now as we mull over the different options. Definitely don’t want to waste iNat users’ time. A big thanks to those who spent time providing IDs, which definitely benefited GBIF’s data, not to mention the end-user’s discovery of nature (in our case a lot of kids, or kids at heart).

Thanks for your help and patience on this.

-Andrew