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Introduction
Fieldtrip Open is an opensource data collection framework for mobile devices that puts you in control. All aspects of the survey, data collection and publishing can be customized and by deploying your own version of the app the look and feel can be also be changed to suit your project / client.
Fieldtrip Open has a powerful survey designer that allows you to add images and conditonal questions to your data collection forms, as well as sliders, checklists and radio buttons. The surveys can also gather photos and audio clips to go with the data captured. Surveys can be redesigned or updated as often as you like without any need for redeploying to the app stores or waiting for approval by a third party.
What makes Fieldtrip Open different to other data collection apps?
Survey Designer
Fieldtrip Open has a powerful survey designer that allows you to add images and conditonal questions to your data collection forms, as well as sliders, checklists and radio buttons. The surveys can also gather photos and audio clips to go with the data captured. Surveys are sent to the app without any need for redeploying to the app stores.
Work Offline
Fieldtrip Open works offline, allowing you to cache maps before going into the field and store the data captured until there is a connection to upload it.
Reposition Location
Fieldtrip Open allows you to reposition your location, for when you can't rely on the GPS of your device, or for remote data collection.
Personal Cloud
Fieldtrip Open uses its own personal cloud API (PCAPI) which allows you to send the data captured to your own datastore or cloud storage. Data can be quality assured and exported in common formats sucha as GeoJSON, CSV, GML, KML...
Plugins
Fieldtrip Open can easily be extended to include extra functionality. There are already powerful tools for: Quality Assurance & Quality Control; An embeded Web Feature Server for delivering results; with others in development.
How do I use Fieldtrip Open?
The Fieldtrip Open framework can be obtained from the following GitHub Repositories:
About
Fieldtrip Open was originally developed by COBWEB (Citizens Observatory WEB, a European Funded FP7 project) from the earlier Fieldtrip GB project. Fieldtrip GB was a free service with much of the same functionality as Fieldtrip Open, but it was limited to Great Britain and only allowed you to store data in Dropbox.
The COBWEB project greatly extended the functionality of the survey designer and allowed maps of anywhere in the world to be used, by harnessing OpenStreetMap. Many other enhancements and functionality was added and the project comitted to keeping the Fieldtrip Open project open under the BSD 3-Clause licence.
Fieldtrip Open is now being maintained by EDINA at the University of Edinburgh, but is a true OpenSource project and we are very welcoming of any contributors to the code, road map or community.
Road Map
The Fieldtrip Open project requires constant maintenance to adapt to changes to the iOS and Android environments and add new features. If you want to report any issues with the software you can comment on the appropriate repo in GitHub (follow the links above) or use the email address in the contact us section below. We'd urge you to also join the mailing list if you want to be informed of any intended changes to the software.
We also have the following development goals for various parts of the framework. These goals are based on current ideas and are subject to change, we welcome and would greatly appreaciate further input from the community:
Current Tasks
- Improve documentation for those new to the project
- Improve documentation of advanced features and plugins
- Dockerise an install version with plugins
Contact
Please check the repositories for lists of bugs that need fixing. We would also welcome your comments about any future directions you would like to see Fieldtrip Open take. These could be minor changes or new technologies to adopt, we want Fieldtrip Open to be driven by the community so please get in touch:
EDINA is a centre for digital expertise and online service delivery at the University of Edinburgh. We are a division of Information Services.