Somethingseen

Somethingseen is a concept and software platform designed to store, verify, and share user-submitted observations of visible phenomena. It emphasizes openness, interoperability, and reproducibility across communities and research disciplines.

It originated in the citizen-science community in the 2020s as a modular framework intended to lower barriers to public contribution. The project promotes standardized data schemas, lightweight client tools, and open licensing to encourage collaboration across institutions.

At its core, somethingseen defines an Observation record with fields such as id, timestamp, geolocation, category, description, media attachments, and quality indicators. The platform provides an API, web and mobile clients, searching, tagging, moderation workflows, and privacy controls to balance openness with safety.

Observations can be exported in common formats (JSON, CSV, GeoJSON) and integrated with other open-data ecosystems through shared vocabularies and crosswalks. The project is released under an open license to maximize reuse.

Users include schools, museums, environmental groups, and researchers who document biodiversity, weather events, urban change, and cultural phenomena. While it broadens access to observational data, challenges include data quality, bias, moderation burden, and privacy concerns.

See also: citizen science, open data, crowd-sourcing platforms.