I've tried to extract the 'gist' of this interesting paper about managing crowd-sourced geospatial data. I think it has interesting applicability to dealing with a data system for geologic field observations.
from S. Andrew Sheppard, Andrea Wiggins, and Loren Terveen, 2014, Capturing Quality: Retaining Provenance for Curated Volunteer Monitoring Data: accessed at http://wq.io/media/papers/provenance_cscw14.pdf 2014-03-01
a general outline of the workflow tasks common to field-based data collection, and a novel data model for preserving provenance metadata that allows for ongoing data exchange between disparate technical systems and participant skill levels.
[observers] head out into the field to collect data. This step is referred to as the event in our proposed data model. As noted above, this is “the intersection of a person, a bird, a time, and a place” for eBird. Similarly, a River Watch sampling event is the combination of a sampling te