A Crowdsourcing Platform for Curating Cultural and Empirical Knowledge. A Study Applied to Botanical Collections

Empirical and Traditional knowledge is part of the concept of intangible cultural heritage, which represents immaterial cultural heritage items such as facts, stories, and traditions that are part of local culture. However, this knowledge might be lost over time. Encouraging public participation to record empirical knowledge is a way to preserve the culture of a region and make it known to others. This paper presents a web system that aims to record and to preserve empirical knowledge data. To achieve this goal, the tool uses three combined approaches: (i) crowdsourcing calls oriented to content creation by visitors; (ii) collaborative curation among experts for selection, evaluation, and publication of content; and (iii) interconnection between user contributions and data already available in open repositories on the web (in LOD format). The tool was applied in the Botany domain to curate empirical and cultural data about medicinal plants, where experts from the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden evaluated it.