This is a Drupal model developed as part of the EU funded Synthesys project. It is intended to act as an adjunct to existing Drupal based crowd sourcing applications.

An increasing number of preserved specimens have been digitally imaged and have subsequently been made available over the web. There is currently an international drive to capture information contained on preserved specimen labels through use of these digital images. To date these efforts have primary focused on the transcription of label data either through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and NLP (Natural Language Processing) or via direct human transcription of the label and parsing and entering label data into appropriate data base fields. This type of activity is both laborious and error prone. This application is intended to provide an alternative approach to image based data capture, eliminating the need for manual key board input and allowing rapid progress through the source material by focusing on answering simple yes/no questions. The focus shifts away from the capture of the entirety of the data available on each specimen label and onto rapid capture of a single data facet across an entire collection

The application provides a tool, targeted at the citizen science community, for the collection information on preserved specimens obtainable from digital images. Operation of the application should require no key board input. The application should be operable on a range of devices including smart phones and tablets but is primarily aim at use on desktop computers. The application should provide a generic framework for this type of activity allowing the images presented and the collection of user responses to be configured on a per installation basis and each installation should be able to individually configure multiple projects. The tool has the potential for use directly in collections management. To achieve this goal direct communication between the application and external collections management data bases has been included in the development.