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Opportunity - SIREN: citizen science project to recover time series of Italian hydro-meteorological data
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- Impacts
- Climate Change
- Worldwide
Data acquired in the most recent years are typically available in digital format. Historical measurements are instead often available only in the printed version of the Hydrological Yearbooks published by the National Hydrological and Mareographic Service. In the past, few initiatives attempted to partially recover this information, but they focused on a limited number of years and/or some regions.
In other words... we need your help!
Within the SIREN (Saving Italian hydRological mEasuremeNts) project, we aim to digitize the historical series of daily flows by crowd-sourcing the recovery of hydrological measurements from historical Hydrological Yearbooks and to produce a consistent dataset. Phase 1 of the SIREN project will be devoted to recovering daily discharge measurements.
Why do we need your help? Why not use optical character recognition software?
Despite the remarkable improvements achieved in recent years by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and machine learning / artificial intelligence techniques, the most accurate digitization approach is still based on manual transcription.
Most of these records are printed in old documents, and the ink may be partially damaged. For example, an "8" can be easily detected as a "3" in these conditions.
Moreover, these tables contain several hand-written corrections performed by different people, thus, with different calligraphies. All these peculiarities limit the applicability of standardized automatic approaches.
