PETRA: A Crowdsourcing-Based Platform for Rocks Data Collection and Characterization

This paper presents details of a distributed platform intended for data acquisition, evaluation, storage and visualization, which is fully implemented under the crowdsourcing paradigm. The proposed platform is the result from collaboration between computer science and petrology researchers and it is intended for academic purposes. The platform is designed within a MTV (Model, Template and View) architecture and also designed for a collaborative data store and managing of rocks from multiple readers and writers, taking advantage of ubiquity of web applications, and neutrality of researchers from different communities to validate the data. The platform is being used and validated by students and academics from our university; in the near future it will be open to other users interested on this topic.