Abstract:
The exponential growth and popularity of mobile devices in the last few years, their
location-based services capabilities, broadband connectivity and ease of use, enable
general public participation in all kinds of crowd sourcing applications. One of the most
interesting possible uses of crowd sourcing are improved surveys, based on ordinary
people’s perceptions and feelings. The spatio-temporal characteristics associated to the
surveyed data bring usually an important focus of the survey. Nonetheless, to be widely
used and to derive useful information, two major hurdles have to be overcome: (i) the
technical complexities presented by the range of operating systems in mobile phones and
network availability, (ii) the risks associated with the quality of the data collected. This
paper describes a solution to these problems developed on top of an open source stack. A
dynamic surveying knowledge server, with a spatial database, holds remotely layers of
information related to a particular survey, guiding and supporting in-field surveyors with
up to date or even live data. The server side of the dynamic surveying knowledge system
contains plugged-in processing algorithms allowing the support to be survey specific. The implementation is designed as a generic framework, so both the client and the server
can support many types of surveys with minimal effort.
