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Robust and Trusted Crowd-Sourcing and Crowd-Tasking in the Future Internet

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A great majority of the EU citizens already owns a cellular phone. An increasing part of these phones are smartphones with a broadband internet connection. This growing network of smart internet enabled devices could act as a dense sensing network, as well as a tool for individual informing and tasking of mobile citizens and volunteers. In order to fully harvest this new resource, we need to understand its rules and develop adequate tools. This paper lists some of the peculiarities of ad-hoc volunteer networks supported by smartphones. It furthermore compares the capabilities and limitations of these networks with other means of observation gathering and activity coordination. This includes: (1) a reflection on the motivation for users participation; (2) human and technical limitations of smartphone-enabled volunteer networks; (3) legal and ethical challenges; (4) reliability and usability issues; as well as (5) issues related to trust and quality of information. The second part of the paper presents our experiences with design and prototypic development of the tools supporting volunteer efforts in the field of environmental monitoring, e-health and crisis management. This development is presented in a wider scope of the “Future Internet Public Private Partnership” research programme. Finally, the paper summarizes our findings and recommendations for further developments.
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Preprint! Final paper at doi://10.1007/978-3-642-41151-9_16
Robust and trusted crowd-sourcing and crowd-tasking in
the Future Internet
Denis Havlik, Maria Egly, Hermann Huber, Peter Kutschera, Markus Fal-
genhauer, Markus Cizek
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Austria
{name.surname}@ait.ac.at
Abstract. A great majority of the EU citizens already owns a cellular phone.
An increasing part of these phones are smartphones with a broadband internet
connection. This growing network of smart internet enabled devices could act
as a dense sensing network, as well as a tool for individual informing and task-
ing of mobile citizens and volunteers.
In order to fully harvest this new resource, we need to understand its rules
and develop adequate tools. This paper lists some of the peculiarities of ad-hoc
volunteer networks supported by smartphones. It furthermore compares the ca-
pabilities and limitations of these networks with other means of observation
gathering and activity coordination. This includes: (1) a reflection on the moti-
vation for users participation; (2) human and technical limitations of
smartphone-enabled volunteer networks; (3) legal and ethical challenges; (4) re-
liability and usability issues; as well as (5) issues related to trust and quality of
information.
The second part of the paper presents our experiences with design and proto-
typic development of the tools supporting volunteer efforts in the field of envi-
ronmental monitoring, e-health and crisis management. This development is
presented in a wider scope of the “Future Internet Public Private Partnership”
research programme.
Finally, the paper summarizes our findings and recommendations for further
developments.
Keywords: crowdsourcing, crowdtasking, human sensors, local situation
awareness, volunteered geographic information, future internet, mobile applica-
tions
1 Motivation
According to a recent comScore whitepaper [1], the smartphone penetration has sur-
passed the 50% mark in US, Canada and the EU5 (UK, France, Germany, Spain and
Italy) during 2012. Moreover, the mobile media already accounts for 37% of the total
time spent online and for a majority of usage in categories well suited for use on
smartphones and tablet PCs: maps, weather, music and social networking. These de-
vices combine (almost) “always on” broadband connectivity, ad-hoc local connectivi-
Preprint! Final paper at doi://10.1007/978-3-642-41151-9_16
ty, significant storage capacity and computing power with intuitive user interfaces and
a number of built-in as well as add-on sensors for various purposes.
Numerous researchers have been testing the usability of smartphones as platforms
for mobile sensing, in the recent past [2, 3]. From the point of view of user interac-
tion, this resulted in two distinct application classes: “opportunistic sensing” [4] ap-
plications, where the user merely allows an application to report (interpreted) readings
of selected sensors, and the participatory sensing applications [5], where users are an
integral part of the sensing and quality assurance loop (“human sensors”,
“crowdsourced quality assurance”), and actively provide information on their envi-
ronment.
In this paper, we shall consider crowdsourcing of observations, data interpretation,
dissemination and (crowd-) tasking as integral part of the mobile Volunteered Geo-
graphic Information (VGI) applications and present a prototype of the Mobile Data
Acquisition Framework (MDAF) which simplifies the task of developing such appli-
cations. The word “observation” is used in-line with the definition of the Open Geo-
spatial Consortium, to indicate geospatially and temporary referenced data reported
by hardware sensors, human sensors or automated processes (nowcasts, forecasts,
virtual sensors, and indicators).
The paper starts with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities of mobile
VGI applications (section 2). Section 3 presents the MDAF framework and section 4
discusses MDAF’s ability to answer these challenges. Finally, section 5 “conclusions
presents the main lessons learned in MDAF development.
2 Challenges and opportunities of mobile VGI applications
This section discusses some “peculiarities” of VGI applications as compared to a
classical monitoring system where all sensors and networking equipment are main-
tained and calibrated by a central authority.
For the start, let us consider some challenges directly resulting from the technology
used in VGI applications: inaccurate sensors, unreliable networks, sub-optimal posi-
tioning of the smartphones for taking measurements and the need to recharge the bat-
tery on (at least) a daily basis. On the whole, smartphones aren’t optimal sensing sys-
tems, and in reality there are only three reasons for (mis)using them in this way: (1)
the phones are already out there and we don’t have to pay for them; (2) they are at the
appropriate location to provide information on phone users and their surroundings;
and (3) the phone users can provide us with information we could not easily get from
hardware sensors.
In opportunistic sensing application, the users merely need to be sufficiently moti-
vated to install an application and let it use the smartphone resources. On the other
hand, the participative applications rely on users as active providers of observations or
“human sensors”1. In some areas, human sensing surpasses the capability of hardware
1 In the simplest case, users may only be asked to use their own judgement to decide when to
start recording and assure the optimal positioning of the smartphone.
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sensors and automated algorithms for sensor data interpretation: recognising and in-
terpreting combinations of visual, audible, and to some extent also olfactory patterns
and anomalies is easy for humans and very difficult for hardware sensing systems. On
the other hand, humans are notoriously bad at some tasks which can be easily per-
formed by hardware sensing systems:
Humans get easily tired and bored, and are notoriously bad at performing repetitive
activities.
Reported data will often depend on the individual sensitivity (e.g. some people are
sensitive to weather changes or pollen, others aren’t), cultural background (is a
playground full of children noisy or music to ones ears?) and even on the current
mood of the reporter.
Finally, the humans are not good at quantification of observations (how loud is
“very loud” in decibel? Which temperature corresponds to “very cold”?)
Fully fledged analysis of the participants’ motives and the ways to enhance the moti-
vation, as presented in e.g. [6], is beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, it is
important to keep in mind that the users’ motivation is crucial for success of all VGI
applications. Some key concepts influencing the users’ motivation for participation in
voluntary activities are summarized below:
Participants can have very different reasons for being both constructive (providing
observations, helping with quality assurance) and destructive (providing misinfor-
mation, misusing the system for spamming or for the personal gain).
Direct or indirect personal gain, including both “monetary gain” and the possibility
to improve own knowledge (intellectual gain) are very strong motivations for
constructive and for the destructive contributions.
Another very strong motivation is the “fun factor” that originates from using the
application.
Knowledge that own contributions will be acknowledged, appreciated, seen by the
peers and used for the well-defined and “good” purpose also greatly enhances the
user motivation.
The ease of use of the system and active solicitation of the information are crucial
for attracting the participants with relatively low motivation levels.
Concerns about misuse of users’ observations and privacy-related information may
lower the willingness of the citizens to participate.
As mentioned above, the participants can be motivated for both constructive and de-
structive contributions. In addition, the “quality” of the human sensors and of the
inexpensive sensors built-in smartphones is a-priory unknown, may vary over time,
and in-lab calibration is often unpractical.
Consequently, the quality of the information in VGI applications is usually esti-
mated based on the combination of statistic methods and human judgment. In many
cases, the application also takes users “reputation” into account a numeric value
indicating how likely it is that a certain user will contribute high quality observations.
Some methods for calculating the users’ reputation are discussed in [7].
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3 MDAF framework
3.1 Vision and functional architecture
Mobile Data Acquisition Framework (MDAF) is a set of mobile and backend soft-
ware components designed to simplify the task of implementing mobile VGI applica-
tions independent on the contents and scope of these data. Our long-term goal is to
develop an application framework which allows loosely organized groups to conduct
measurement campaigns and to analyse and discuss the results online. For the reasons
explained in section 2, the framework must also: (1) support automated and manual
tasking of the volunteers; (2) provide mechanisms for interpreting the meaning and
quality of the observations; and (3) assure that the privacy and security of the users
and the data transferred and stored in the framework is handled carefully according to
legal constraints.
The use of MDAF from the mobile user perspective is illustrated on Fig. 1 below.
Fig. 1. MDAF mobile use cases
Users can: (1) view existing knowledge; (2) report new objects of interest2 (OOI) and
new observations on existing OOIs; and (3) receive alerts and event notifications on
changes and requests for performing certain tasks pertinent to their areas on interest
(AOI)3. The “offline mode” and “offline interface” are necessary to improve the over-
all reliability and usability of the system:
2 OOI is a specialization of “thing” in internet of things and “feature” in OGC context.
3 AOI is, as a word suggests, an area that the user is interested in.
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“Offline mode” is a consequence of the requirement that the application remains
fully functional in slow and unreliable networks. As a welcome side-effect, the pre-
loading and caching of the information pertinent to user-defined AOIs lowers the
requirements on network bandwidth and latency during field trials.
“Offline interface” refers to the requirement that users can provide input by means
other than the smartphone GUI interface, e.g. using some of the built-in sensors to
either directly provide the observation, or to record the users input.
From the perspective of a service using the data collected and stored within the
framework, MDAF must provide a way to: (1) combine the observations received
from mobile users with data from external sources; (2) quality assure and interpret the
resulting data heap; and (3) assure that the results can be queried and accessed by any
service that needs them. For the sake of efficiency, the framework must both generate
events, which can be used to trigger external processing services for each incoming
observation and provide a service interface for accessing the observation (“pull”) at a
later time. Main MDAF use cases from the backend perspective are illustrated in the
Fig. 2 below.
Fig. 2. MDAF backend use cases
This figure also illustrates the way MDAF organizes information and interacts with
other services:
Most of the data is considered “observations” geospatially and temporary anno-
tated information on some real-world or virtual “objects of interest”. The observa-
tions can originate from our own application, from third party observation net-
works or from some processing service.
Preprint! Final paper at doi://10.1007/978-3-642-41151-9_16
“Objects of interest” themselves can be either simple data objects representing the
real world objects4 or other observations. The observations which refer to existing
observations are called “observations on observations”. They provide additional in-
formation on quality and meaning of the initial observations. This information can
be provided by users as well as by automated processes.
The framework does not prevent the users and automated processes from publish-
ing incomplete or conflicting observations and a-priory does not make any judg-
ments on the quality of this information. The task of interpreting the resulting ob-
servation heap and producing a useful view on this data is considered application
specific, delegated to external processes and the results are stored in “application
specific views”.
The importance of this data model for VGI applications can be easily illustrated by
the example of consensus building(Fig. 3). If several users are asked to report
observations on a single OOI, the most likely result is a non-consistent heap of obser-
vations. The fact that all these observations can peacefully co-exist within MDAF
allows us to decide which of the observations are most plausible at application level,
possibly taking into account some additional information, such as users’ reputations,
observations reported by automated processes, statistical analysis of the nearby re-
ports or the probability of reported observations in a local habitat.
Fig. 3. Consensus Building
3.2 Implementation Architecture
Our initial idea was to follow the ideas of the SANY SensorSA architecture and re-
use the existing OGC service interfaces, most notably the Sensor Observation Service
(SOS) for serving of the observations [8, 9]. However, the initial tests with
smartphones indicated that the combination of (Geo)JSON and RESTful service inter-
faces is more appropriate for mobile applications than the XML/OGC-style web ser-
vice combination used by SOS. In addition, we needed a service that would run both
on a backend and on mobile phone and synchronize the data to the users’ device as
needed.
CouchDB [10] offered exactly the type of functionality we needed: (1) a geospa-
tially-enabled database which can be deployed both on a smartphone and on a
backend; (2) RESTful http interface and a native support for (Geo)JSON; (3) Robust
4 In simplest case, the OOI will contain a unique ID and a reference to object type.
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multi-master “eventually consistent” synchronization protocol allowing two-way
partial synchronization of the data that fulfils the query criteria; and (4) Built-in event
queue which can be used to trigger the sending of appropriate messages to users and
other services.
MDAF implementation architecture is illustrated in Fig. 4.
Fig. 4. MDAF implementation architecture
The MDAF backend maintains a 1:1 replica of the user database on each mobile
device. Every database is connected to the central MDAF database via filtered rep-
lication. This architecture assures the eventual consistency between all databases.
CouchDB generates internal events for each database change. MDAF event-hander
monitors these events and triggers appropriate observation processing modules.
MDAF observation processing modules are self-contained pieces of software
which implement most of the MDAF server-side application logic. They usually
receive new observations from the event handler, generate additional observations
based on processing results and store them on the central database from where they
can be distributed to mobile users. In many cases the modules act as connectors
and the actual processing is delegated to external services.
Our main concern on the mobile application side was to assure portability. In order to
achieve this goal, we opted for a hybrid development model where most of the appli-
cation logic is realized using standardized platform independent technology. Plat-
form-specific libraries are only used to access the underlying hardware.
As illustrated in Fig. 5, the hardware access is handled by PhoneGap/Apache Cor-
dova. The application functionality build upon Cordova is offered by the Sencha
Touch mobile application framework. An evaluation of the usability of the Cordo-
va/Sencha Touch combination for cross-platform mobile application development can
be found e.g. in [11].
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Fig. 5. Technologies used in MDAF mobile app development
3.3 Integration in ENVIROFI and FI-Ware architecture
The power of the MDAF framework originates from its ability to reuse the data and
functionality offered by the third party data access and processing services. Within the
scope of ENVIROFI, our primary goal was to assure that the MDAF framework can
be used in combination with Generic Enablers (GEs) developed within FI-Ware pro-
ject, as well as in combination with the environmental Specific Enablers (SEs) devel-
oped within ENVIROFI [12]. In fact, the MDAF framework is an integral part of the
ENVIROFI architecture and implements three SEs:
MDAF backend service is the reference implementation of the Environmental
Georeferenced Observation Collection Service.
The caching database deployed on user devices is the reference implementation of
the Environmental Georeferenced Observation Proxy Service.
Two mobile applications (see section 4.1) are considered implementations of the
Environmental-Georeferenced Observation App.
The interaction of other enablers and other third party applications and services is
achieved through implementation of the appropriate data access interfaces and obser-
vation processing/connector modules (see Fig. 4). The simplest type of modules acts
as clients to third party data access services and can be used to import the data from
external sources into MDAF. So far, the data can be imported from: OGC Web Fea-
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ture Service [13], OGC SOS [14], Shapefiles and proprietary RESTful interface of the
NILU air quality service.
More complex modules provide read-only or read-write access to MDAF observa-
tions. Primary data access to MDAF observation is the RESTful CouchDB interface.
This interface allows retrieval of observations corresponding to specific geo-locations
(within Bounding Box), observation IDs, OOI IDs, filtering on various object proper-
ties and publication of new observations. In addition, we have also implemented:
A connector to TS-Toolbox and SUDPLAN’s implementation of the Sensor Ob-
servation Service [15]. This allows us to provide access to MDAF observations
over standardized SOS interface.
A connector to ENVIROFI Environmental Image Sample Classification Service
SE [16]. This allows us to automatically submit all observations of the “leaf im-
age” type to this SE as well as to integrate the results (list of species with similar
leafs) as additional observations.
A connector to Google Cloud Messaging [17] provides an alternative channel (in
addition to CouchDB replication mechanism) for pushing alerts and task requests
to MDAF users.
Finally, a two-way connector for exchanging events (observations) between
MDAF and the Publish/Subscribe Context Broker GE [18] facilitates integration of
MDAF in the Future Internet applications.
4 Development status and outlook
The development of MDAF started in Q4 2012, with the intention to support the de-
velopment of the “conceptual prototypes” of the future internet enabled environmen-
tal applications. In the course of the project, the complexity and maturity of the
MDAF framework grew way beyond a simple proof of concept. Nevertheless, further
effort is required to reach the maturity level which would allow us to use this frame-
work in real world applications.
4.1 ENVIROFI pilots
Within ENVIROFI, MDAF has been used in two sample applications concentrating
on participatory sensing and on the human/environment interaction:
The Personal Environmental Information System (PEIS) application allows users
to track information on airborne pollutants, pollen as well as meteorology and cor-
relates these with personal well-being information. Additionally, it enables the user
to share current local environmental conditions as described in [19, 20]. The main
user interface elements and use cases of the PEIS application are illustrated in Fig.
6.
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Fig. 6. PEIS enables users to relate personal well-being to environmental observations
The “biodiversity” application allows users to receive and publish information on
biodiversity in area(s) they are interested in [21]. The current prototype has been
designed and developed in cooperation with the Long Term Ecological Research
(LTER) Austria [22] and specializes in the objects of the type “tree”.
Both applications can be downloaded from ENVIROFI catalogue and tested on an-
droid smartphones. PEIS app is developed only to a proof of concept level, whereas
the biodiversity prototype is almost completed in the terms of features.
Comparison of the MDAF-related features of the pilots is shown in the Table 1.
Biodiversity pilot
PEIS pilot
Observations from
external sources
Tree databases of Vienna, Tus-
cany and LTER Eisenwurzen
(WFS, shapefiles)
Air quality in Vienna,
Stockholm and Karlsruhe
(SOS, NILU RESTful)
Observations from
mobile users
Various observations on trees,
in-line with requirements of the
LTER-Austria.
Barometric sensor read-
ing and own reactions on
environmental conditions
Observations gener-
ated by SEs
Leaf identification
Air quality coverage
Service interfaces
CouchDB RESTful
CouchDB, OGC SOS
Offline GUI
Assign NFC tag to OOI; identi-
fy OOI by NFC tag
-
Events
CouchDB, FI-Ware, Google
cloud messaging
CouchDB
Filtering
By area, numeric parameters,
text
Threshold
Key functionality
implemented by FI-
Ware GEs
Authentication; image store;
event handling; web GUI inter-
face
-
Areas of Interest
User-defined AOIs
predefined regions: Vien-
na, Stockholm, Karlsruhe
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Biodiversity pilot
PEIS pilot
Alerting
New observations in users
AOIs
. Can be sorted by time
and by distance from the user.
Threshold for various air
quality parameters
Tasking
Request additional observa-
tions (partially implemented)
-
Crowdsourced quali-
ty assurance
consensus” (partially imple-
mented)
-
Automated quality
assurance
Leaf identification; common
name/Latin
name; probability
within habitat (partially imple-
mented)
-
Offline mode
Background maps, tree types
and status within user-defined
areas of interest
-
Table 1. MDAF-supported functionality in ENVIROFI pilots
4.2 Beyond ENVIROFI
So far, the MDAF framework has been developed and tested primarily in the context
of environmental observations and the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership ini-
tiative. Due to combination of time constraints, resource constrains and low maturity
of the FI-Ware platform, we were able to integrate and test only a small subset of the
FI-Ware GEs. In spite of the weak support for geospatial data and processing, which
has been identified as main shortcoming of FI-Ware by the ENVIROFI team [23], our
analysis indicated several GEs with “high potential” for future VGI applications.
Likewise, the ENVIROFI experience has thought us that the use of external data
fusion and processing services can greatly improve the overall quality and usability of
VGI applications. However, most of the algorithms used by these services are highly
application specific and therefore not likely to ever become part of the core MDAF
offering.
With ENVIROFI project approaching its finalization, our mid-term goal is to use
MDAF to facilitate active citizen participation in applications combining environmen-
tal awareness with topics such as human health/well-being, traffic, energy or crisis
management.
Our development priorities are therefore to: (1) develop robust and generic reputa-
tion, crowdtasking and consensus building modules; (2) stimulate the volunteer’s
motivation by various incentives (see [6]); (3) improve the overall quality, perfor-
mance and scalability of the framework; (4) consolidate and standardize the MDAF
data model and service interfaces; (5) improve the overall security of the application
and assure the delicate information (e.g. information related to users health or sight-
ings of rare species) is adequately protected per design; (6) further develop the con-
cept of “offline use” in case of network failure towards fully autonomous pear to pear
exchange of information over ad-hoc networks; (7) simplify the task of developing
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new application to the level where this can be done by users with no software devel-
opment experience; and (8) test the promise of OS-independent development by actu-
ally rolling out the application on non-Android devices.
5 Conclusions
The MDAF framework demonstrates the feasibility of developing robust and trusted
crowd-sourcing and crowd-tasking applications in the context of Future Internet.
Some of the concepts and technologies tested in MDAF and validated in the
ENVIROFI applications are novel and have the potential for greatly enhancing the
functionality offered by future mobile VGI applications. For example:
The use of document-oriented CouchDB database with native http RESTful inter-
face allows greater flexibility at the level of data models.
The hybrid development model where most of the application is written in
HTML5/Javascript lowers the cost of cross-platform development.
The CouchDB replication mechanism and the possibility to run the same database
on server backend and on the mobile device greatly improve usability of the appli-
cation on slow and unreliable networks, offsets workload from the central server
and minimizes the requirements on bandwidth and latency during field work.
User-defined Areas of Interest completely eliminate the need for disclosing the
current users’ position to the central server, while still assuring the messages rele-
vant for the user (e.g. alerts pertinent to his or her AOIs).
The data model explained in section 3.1 allows MDAF-based applications to pro-
vide a consistent and easy to understand views on observations, even if the under-
lying dataset contains incomplete and conflicting observations.
Based on the experiences with development of the biodiversity and PEIS applications,
we are confident that MDAF provides excellent answers to most of the challenges
mentioned in section 2 of this paper and will develop into a fully-fledged framework
for VGI applications. However, it is important to understand that the MDAF devel-
opment is not yet finalized and that some important features (e.g. fully-fledged trust
and reliability management, incentives for participating volunteers and secured data
access) will have to be developed in the follow-up projects.
6 Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Com-
munity’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n◦
284898 (ENVIROFI).
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Tuominen, J., Middleton, S. E., Arbab-Zavar, B.: D1.3.2 Functional and Organisational
Specification for Biodiversity Pilots II, Public deliverable of ENVIROFI project,
ENVIROFI Consortium (2012).
21. Umweltbundesamt Austria: Austrian Long Term Research Network,
http://www.umweltbundesamt.at/umweltsituation/lter_allgemein (2013)
22. Usländer, T., Berre, A., Canut, C. G., Havlik, D., Lorenzo, J., Sabeur, Z., Modefferi, S.:
The Future Internet Enablement of the Environment Informaiton Space, In proceedings of
ISESs 2013, Springer (2013).
... -The nature of volunteerism in the affected context (Aguirre et al., 2017;Carlton and Mills, 2017;Lindner, 2017). -The data protection and crisis laws (Havlik et al., 2013;Grubmüller-Régent et al., 2014;Sobiegalla et al., 2017). -Accessibility and usability of ICT (infrastructure, technology, digital platforms, workspaces, databases etc.) (Bram and Vestergren, 2012;Qadir et al., 2016;Auferbauer and Tellioğlu, 2017). ...
... This manager also says that there are different cultural attitudes to how actively volunteers should engage in crisis response activities that need to be taken into account in volunteer coordination. Havlik et al. (2013) reflect on the need to address the legal and ethical challenges associated with engaging citizens in crowd sourcing or crowd tasking activities during ongoing crisis events. A Swedish report has also studied a range of more specific legal questions and issues associated with CV, not least how liability should be managed if a volunteer is injured or killed while volunteering in crisis response (Holm, 2016). ...
... ISCV research has so far demonstrated greater representation from the perspective of focusing on the theory of the solution, with a narrower focus on IT-artefacts and their immediate context. This is particularly obvious via the strong interest in IT artefact design relating to crowd sourcing solutions (Havlik et al., 2013;Chu et al., 2015;Zhang et al., 2019b), crowd tasking (Auferbauer et al., 2015;Barrenechea et al., 2015), uses of social media (Chroust, 2013;Reuter et al., 2015), crisis mapping (VGI) (Kerle and Hoffman, 2013;De Albuquerque et al., 2016a) and collaboration solutions (Cobb et al., 2014;Ernst et al., 2017). Design or development of IT artefacts is also considered for needs such as emergency description (Erskine and Pepper, 2015), networked community resilience (Comes, 2016), position tracking (Hanssen, 2015), distributing emergency information (Hidayanti and Supangkat, 2018), alerting systems (Kaufhold et al., 2019), decision support (Neville et al., 2018) or volunteer recruitment (Thomas et al., 2019). ...
Thesis
Full-text available
In the summer of 2018, Sweden was taken by surprise and engulfed by forest fires on an unprecedented scale. Various forms of crisis volun-teerism (CV) proved essential in the large scale response that ensued. Previous information systems (IS) research gives insights, both theo-retically and practically, on the potential of IS and digitalisation to enhance and support crisis response. However, the forest fires demon-strated that CV practices and practitioners in Sweden have practically no such support. CV is, in other words, an essential part of the crisis response system, but unsupported by dedicated digitalisation. The aim of this thesis is therefore to understand what is required to enable a digital transformation (DT) that will significantly improve CV practice and the overall crisis response system. Sweden is not unique in this respect. From an international per-spective, IS research devotes much attention to the area of crisis re-sponse. However, this is most commonly done using the perspective and needs of crisis management stakeholders as a departing point. Al-so, despite research on and the availability of IS solutions, the degree of practical implementation would appear to be low. This thesis is therefore also based on the perceived knowledge gap that the lack of IS and digitalisation supporting CV is, in part, a result of the lack of re-search focus on volunteer stakeholders and the CV practice itself. An-other gap noted is the lack of knowledge regarding the real-world prac-tice of CV which contributes to undermining the development and use of IS solutions for CV. This thesis, therefore, provides a much needed holistic understand-ing of real-world CV. This understanding moves the perspective of volunteer stakeholders to the forefront without losing the perspective of crisis management. This has been done via an empirical study in the aftermath of the Swedish forest fires crisis as well as via studies of international IS literature on crisis response and CV. This has resulted in a unique holistic and comprehensive model that relates to the com-plexity, dynamics and emergence involved in CV practice. Via this model it is possible to relate specific parts or aspects of CV practice, to the whole practice area and continue modelling attributes in greater detail, as required, depending on DT or IS design needs. Underlying the focus in this thesis lies a mild critique of previous IS research with more reductionist approaches, whereby the relevance of broader contextual understandings has been downplayed. The thesis aligns with perspectives on digitalisation and IS design, proposing the relevance of developing broader holistic understandings of research topics. That is, understandings that have greater potential to reveal how phenomena come into being and are adapted in environmental con-texts. DT is understood in terms of a process whereby broader under-standings of phenomena are used to identify needs (triggers), strategies and capabilities that will inform IS design initiatives. An analytical framework depicting this process and its main components and rela-tionships has been designed in this thesis to contribute to an under-standing of what is required to digitally transform CV practice. In summary, the thesis provides a new holistic approach and un-derstanding for the CV practice area and how it may be digitally trans-formed. The thesis also contributes to a new perspective on DT, ap-plied to a complex and non-organisation based setting. This knowledge is of relevance to both practitioners and IS researchers in crisis re-sponse and CV. The CV practice meta-model and the analytical framework for digital transformation can be used to enable and inform future digital transformation strategies and policy in Sweden and in-ternationally. They can also contribute to guiding the initiation of prac-tical IS design initiatives, with greater potential to enhance and im-prove both CV and overall crisis response. The research was performed within the information systems (IS) discipline.
... -The nature of volunteerism in the affected context (Aguirre et al., 2017;Carlton and Mills, 2017;Lindner, 2017). -The data protection and crisis laws (Havlik et al., 2013;Grubmüller-Régent et al., 2014;Sobiegalla et al., 2017). -Accessibility and usability of ICT (infrastructure, technology, digital platforms, workspaces, databases etc.) (Bram and Vestergren, 2012;Qadir et al., 2016;Auferbauer and Tellioğlu, 2017). ...
... This manager also says that there are different cultural attitudes to how actively volunteers should engage in crisis response activities that need to be taken into account in volunteer coordination. Havlik et al. (2013) reflect on the need to address the legal and ethical challenges associated with engaging citizens in crowd sourcing or crowd tasking activities during ongoing crisis events. A Swedish report has also studied a range of more specific legal questions and issues associated with CV, not least how liability should be managed if a volunteer is injured or killed while volunteering in crisis response (Holm, 2016). ...
... ISCV research has so far demonstrated greater representation from the perspective of focusing on the theory of the solution, with a narrower focus on IT-artefacts and their immediate context. This is particularly obvious via the strong interest in IT artefact design relating to crowd sourcing solutions (Havlik et al., 2013;Chu et al., 2015;Zhang et al., 2019b), crowd tasking (Auferbauer et al., 2015;Barrenechea et al., 2015), uses of social media (Chroust, 2013;Reuter et al., 2015), crisis mapping (VGI) (Kerle and Hoffman, 2013;De Albuquerque et al., 2016a) and collaboration solutions (Cobb et al., 2014;Ernst et al., 2017). Design or development of IT artefacts is also considered for needs such as emergency description (Erskine and Pepper, 2015), networked community resilience (Comes, 2016), position tracking (Hanssen, 2015), distributing emergency information (Hidayanti and Supangkat, 2018), alerting systems (Kaufhold et al., 2019), decision support (Neville et al., 2018) or volunteer recruitment (Thomas et al., 2019). ...
Thesis
Full-text available
In the summer of 2018, Sweden was taken by surprise and engulfed by forest fires on an unprecedented scale. Various forms of crisis volunteerism (CV) proved essential in the large scale response that ensued. Previous information systems (IS) research gives insights, both theoretically and practically, on the potential of IS and digitalisation to enhance and support crisis response. However, the forest fires demonstrated that CV practices and practitioners in Sweden have practically no such support. CV is, in other words, an essential part of the crisis response system, but unsupported by dedicated digitalisation. The aim of this thesis is therefore to understand what is required to enable a digital transformation (DT) that will significantly improve CV practice and the overall crisis response system. Sweden is not unique in this respect. From an international perspective, IS research devotes much attention to the area of crisis response. However, this is most commonly done using the perspective and needs of crisis management stakeholders as a departing point. Also, despite research on and the availability of IS solutions, the degree of practical implementation would appear to be low. This thesis is there-fore also based on the perceived knowledge gap that the lack of IS and digitalisation supporting CV is, in part, a result of the lack of research focus on volunteer stakeholders and the CV practice itself. Another gap noted is the lack of knowledge regarding the real-world practice of CV which contributes to undermining the development and use of IS solutions for CV. This thesis, therefore, provides a much needed holistic understanding of real-world CV. This understanding moves the perspective of volunteer stakeholders to the forefront without losing the perspective of crisis management. This has been done via an empirical study in the aftermath of the Swedish forest fires crisis as well as via studies of international IS literature on crisis response and CV. This has resulted in a unique holistic and comprehensive model that relates to the complexity, dynamics and emergence involved in CV practice. Via this model it is possible to relate specific parts or aspects of CV practice, to the whole practice area and continue modelling attributes in greater detail, as required, depending on DT or IS design needs. Underlying the focus in this thesis lies a mild critique of previous IS research with more reductionist approaches, whereby the relevance of broader contextual understandings has been downplayed. The thesis aligns with perspectives on digitalisation and IS design, proposing the relevance of developing broader holistic understandings of research topics. That is, understandings that have greater potential to reveal how phenomena come into being and are adapted in environmental con-texts. DT is understood in terms of a process whereby broader under-standings of phenomena are used to identify needs (triggers), strategies and capabilities that will inform IS design initiatives. An analytical framework depicting this process and its main components and relationships has been designed in this thesis to contribute to an under-standing of what is required to digitally transform CV practice. In summary, the thesis provides a new holistic approach and understanding for the CV practice area and how it may be digitally trans-formed. The thesis also contributes to a new perspective on DT, applied to a complex and non-organisation based setting. This knowledge is of relevance to both practitioners and IS researchers in crisis response and CV. The CV practice meta-model and the analytical framework for digital transformation can be used to enable and inform future digital transformation strategies and policy in Sweden and internationally. They can also contribute to guiding the initiation of practical IS design initiatives, with greater potential to enhance and improve both CV and overall crisis response. The research was performed within the information systems (IS) discipline.
... Finally, Drosatos et al. and Havlik et al. describe specific algorithmic platforms to guarantee data protection for citizen scientists involved in research. These platforms rely on novel privacy enhancing technologies, such as homomorphic encryption, to protect the identity of participants included in research (Havlik et al., 2013;Drosatos et al., 2014). ...
... A number of the studies included in this sample reported discarding or questioning data due to data quality issues (Aoki et al., 2009;Andersson and Sternberg, 2016;Theunis et al., 2017;Barzyk et al., 2018;Vesnic-Alujevic et al., 2018). The nature of volunteered geographic or crowdsourced information means there can be substantial variances in data quality that are difficult to calibrate in the laboratory (Elwood et al., 2012;Ferster et al., 2013;Havlik et al., 2013;Wylie et al., 2014;Wiggins and He, 2016;Komninos, 2019;Weir et al., 2019). ...
Book
Full-text available
Social innovations are usually understood as new ideas, initiatives, or solutions that make it possible to meet the challenges of societies in fields such as social security, education, employment, culture, health, environment, housing, and economic development. On the one hand, many citizen science activities serve to achieve scientific as well as social and educational goals. Thus, these actions are opening an arena for introducing social innovations. On the other hand, some social innovations are further developed, adapted, or altered after the involvement of scientist-supervised citizens (laypeople or volunteers) in research and with the use of the citizen science tools and methods such as action research, crowdsourcing, and community-based participatory research. Such approaches are increasingly recognized as crucial for gathering data, addressing community needs, and creating engagement and cooperation between citizens and professional scientists. However, there are also various barriers to both citizen science and social innovation. For example, management, quality and protection of data, funding difficulties, non-recognition of citizens' contributions, and limited inclusion of innovative research approaches in public policies. In this volume, we open theoretical as well as empirically-based discussion, including examples, practices, and case studies of at least three types of relations between citizen science and social innovation: (1) domination of the citizen science features over social innovation aspects; (2) domination of the social innovation features over the citizen science aspects; and (3) the ways to achieve balance and integration between the social innovation and citizen science features. Each of these relationships highlights factors that influence the development of the main scales of sustainability of innovations in the practice. These innovations are contributing to a new paradigm of learning and sharing knowledge as well as interactions and socio-psychological development of participants. Also, there are factors that influence the development of platforms, ecosystems, and sustainability of innovations such as broad use of the information and communications technologies (ICTs) including robotics and automation; emerging healthcare and health promotion models; advancements in the development and governance of smart, green, inclusive and age-friendly cities and communities; new online learning centers; agri-food, cohousing or mobility platforms; and engagement of citizens into co-creation or co-production of services delivered by public, private, non-governmental (NGOs) organizations as well as non-formal entities.
... Finally, Drosatos et al. and Havlik et al. describe specific algorithmic platforms to guarantee data protection for citizen scientists involved in research. These platforms rely on novel privacy enhancing technologies, such as homomorphic encryption, to protect the identity of participants included in research (Havlik et al., 2013;Drosatos et al., 2014). ...
... A number of the studies included in this sample reported discarding or questioning data due to data quality issues (Aoki et al., 2009;Andersson and Sternberg, 2016;Theunis et al., 2017;Barzyk et al., 2018;Vesnic-Alujevic et al., 2018). The nature of volunteered geographic or crowdsourced information means there can be substantial variances in data quality that are difficult to calibrate in the laboratory (Elwood et al., 2012;Ferster et al., 2013;Havlik et al., 2013;Wylie et al., 2014;Wiggins and He, 2016;Komninos, 2019;Weir et al., 2019). ...
Article
Full-text available
Digital innovation is ever more present and increasingly integrated into citizen science research. However, smartphones and other connected devices come with specific features and characteristics and, in consequence, raise particular ethical issues. This article addresses this important intersection of citizen science and the Internet of Things by focusing on how such ethical issues are communicated in scholarly literature. To answer this research question, this article presents a scoping review of published scientific studies or case studies of scientific studies that utilize both citizen scientists and Internet of Things devices. Specifically, this scoping review protocol retrieved studies where the authors had included at least a short discussion of the ethical issues encountered during the research process. A full text analysis of relevant articles conducted inductively and deductively identified three main categories of ethical issues being communicated: autonomy and data privacy, data quality, and intellectual property. Based on these categories, this review offers an overview of the legal and social innovation implications raised. This review also provides recommendations for researchers who wish to innovatively integrate citizen scientists and Internet of Things devices into their research based on the strategies researchers took to resolve these ethical issues.
... Finally, Drosatos et al and Havlik et al describe specific algorithmic platforms to allow citizen scientists to participate in research. These platforms rely on novel privacy enhancing technologies, such as homomorphic encryption, to protect the identity of participants included in research (Drosatos et al, 2014;Havlik et al, 2013). ...
... In a similar fashion, a number of the studies included in our sample reported discarding or questioning data due to data quality issues(Andersson & Sternberg, 2016;Aoki et al, 2009;Barzyk et al, 2018;Theunis et al, 2017;Vesnic-Alujevic et al, 2018). The nature of volunteered geographic or crowdsourced information means there can be substantial variances in data quality that are difficulty to calibrate in the laboratory(Elwood et al, 2012;Ferster et al, 2013;Havlik et al, 2013;Komninos, 2019;Weir et al, 2019;Wiggins & He, 2016;Wylie et al, 2014). ...
Preprint
Full-text available
Our chapter presents a scoping review of published scientific studies or case studies of scientific studies that utilise both citizen scientists and Internet of Things devices. Specifically, we selected studies where the authors had included at least a short discussion of the ethical issues encountered during the research process. Having conducted a search of five databases (IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, ProQuest, and PubMed), we identified 631 potential results. Following abstract and title screening, and then full text eligibility assessment, we identified 34 published articles that matched our criteria. We then analysed the full text for these articles inductively and deductively, coding ethical issues into three main categories. These categories were autonomy and data privacy, data quality, and intellectual property. We also analysed the full text of these articles to see what strategies researchers took to resolve these ethical issues, as well as any legal implications raised. Following this analysis, our discussion provides recommendations for researchers who wish to integrate citizen scientists and Internet of Things devices into their research. First, all citizen science projects should integrate a data privacy protocol to protect the confidentiality of participants. Secondly, scientific researchers should consider any potential issues of data quality, including whether compromises might be required, before establishing a project. Finally, all intellectual property issues should be clarified both at the start of the project and during its lifecycle. Researchers should also consider any ethical issues that might flow from the use of commercially available Internet of Things devices for research.
... There is a growing network of smart internet enabled devices due to the spread of smart-phones. This rise possibility for data crowdsourcing, but advantages and disadvantages are involved (Havlik et al., 2013); Several issues have to be considered: a reflection on the motivation for users participation, human and technical limitations of smartphone-enabled volunteer networks, legal and ethical challenges, reliability and usability issues, and issues related to trust and quality of information. Wiggins and Crowston (2011) sees the crowd-sourcing as "a form of research collaboration involving members of the public in scientific research projects to address real-world problems" and as a citizen science. ...
Thesis
Full-text available
Hailstorms have the potential to cause severe damage to infrastructures, vehicles and agriculture. The losses resulting from hailstreaks can sum up to an amount which makes them one of the costliest natural hazards in Central Europe. Therefore, monitoring hail and the estimate of the hailstone diameter are essential tasks for weather forecasts, warnings and insurance assessments. Crowd-sourcing is a low-cost way to allocate large datasets and becomes more popular in Meteorology. This Master’s thesis focuses on the verification of radar-based hail detection algorithms using crowd-sourced data and hail sensor measurements. The Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss and Mobiliar developed crowd-sourcing smart-phone applications, which collect hail reports from users. Additionally, hail measurements from 10 hail sensor stations located in regions with high hail occurrence was used for the analysis. Neighbourhood methods were introduced to face the chaotic nature of the user’s reporting procedures. A median and an inverse distance weighting was computed for all neighbourhoods. The best match for each hail report in temporal and spatial windows was taken. Additionally, a categorical verification was applied for selected communities separately.
... Despite the positive results attained with the utilization of crowdsourced data in the past, there is no warranty that the people will post correct information in future also. Lack of knowledge, mischief or to mislead may be the reason for false information sharing [28]. Social data mining brings the additional issue of data interpretation by machines. ...
Article
Full-text available
In the occurrence of natural or artificial disasters, conveying immediate and precise situation awareness (SA) information from the salient disaster scenes to the first responders is vital. Crowdsourcing can offer enormous heterogeneous data collected from diverse sources such as sensors, smartphones, vehicles, IoT devices, buildings, and social media. Sending the crowdsourced SA data to the Cloud for analyzation is futile as the opportunity to act immediately may be lost due to delay constraints. However, analyzation of the data-intensive and media-rich contents impose accessibility to massive computational resources, which may be unresponsive in the disaster zone. Fog computing allows quick analyzation of the heterogeneous SA data on the site closer to the disaster scene. This article describes an architecture named SAFER (SDN Assisted Fog computing for Emergency Resilience) which provisions Fog computing and Software-Defined Networking for efficient disaster management. We evaluated the SAFER architecture using simulation tools consuming heterogeneous data and verified that better Quality of Service is achieved by reducing the Service Delay in both transmission and computation. Using SAFER architecture disasters can be detected early than conventional Cloud-based disaster management schemes so that more human lives can be saved.
Chapter
Volunteer geographic information and user-generated content represents a source of updated information about what people perceive from their environment. Its analysis generates the opportunity to develop processes to study and solve social problems that affect the people's lives, merging technology and real data. One of the problems in urban areas is the traffic. Every day at big cities people lose time, money, and life quality when they get stuck in traffic jams; another urban problem derived from traffic is air pollution. In the present approach, a traffic event classification methodology is implemented to analyze VGI and internet information related to traffic events with a view to identify the main traffic problems in a city and to visualize the congested roads. The methodology uses different computing tools and algorithms to achieve the goal. To obtain the data, a social media and RSS channels are consulted. The extracted data texts are classified into seven possible traffic events, and geolocalized. In the classification, a machine learning algorithm is applied.
Chapter
Volunteer geographic information and user-generated content represents a source of updated information about what people perceive from their environment. Its analysis generates the opportunity to develop processes to study and solve social problems that affect the people's lives, merging technology and real data. One of the problems in urban areas is the traffic. Every day at big cities people lose time, money, and life quality when they get stuck in traffic jams; another urban problem derived from traffic is air pollution. In the present approach, a traffic event classification methodology is implemented to analyze VGI and internet information related to traffic events with a view to identify the main traffic problems in a city and to visualize the congested roads. The methodology uses different computing tools and algorithms to achieve the goal. To obtain the data, a social media and RSS channels are consulted. The extracted data texts are classified into seven possible traffic events, and geolocalized. In the classification, a machine learning algorithm is applied.
Chapter
Social networks provide information about activities of humans and social events. Thus, with the help of social networks, we can extract the traffic events that occur in a city. In the context of an urban area, this kind of data allows to obtaining contextual real-time information shared among citizens that will be useful to address social, environmental and economic issues. In this paper, the authors describe a methodology to obtain information related to traffic events such as accidents or congestion, from Twitter messages and RSS services. A text mining process is applied on the messages to acquire the relevant data, then data are classified by using a machine learning algorithm. The events are geocoded and transformed into geometric points to be represented on a map. The final repository lets data to be available for further works related to the traffic events on the study area. As a case of study we consider Mexico City.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Air quality and air pollution have a very large impact on human health. The sensitivity to different pollutants varies per person, therefore it is important that citizens can get personalised air quality information. The Personal Environmental Information System (PEIS) aims at delivering just that. The PEIS takes sensor data from several data providers and employs a service-oriented architecture to deliver these observations to the user through a smartphone application. The PEIS also uses scientific models to fuse the sensor data and create new, derived observations. To make scientific models that fuse sensor data fit better in a service-oriented architecture, a software framework called Fusion4Decision was developed. This framework is based on Open Geospatial Consortium standards and allows scientific models written in languages like MATLAB or R to be available as a web service. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.
Conference Paper
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This paper motivates the enablement of the Future Internet to become a highly functional service platform supporting the design and the operation of software applications in the Environmental Information Space. It reports on the experience made by the European research project ENVIROFI as one of the usage area projects within the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership programme. It describes the software components (environmental and specific enablers) which are required to connect with the domain-independent capabilities (generic enablers) of the Future Internet core platform for geospatially and environmentally-driven applications.
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Sensor Observation Service (SOS) is a Web service specification defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) group in order to standardize the way sensors and sensor data are discovered and accessed on the Web. This standard goes a long way in providing interoperability between repositories of heterogeneous sensor data and applications that use this data. Many of these applications, however, are ill equipped at handling raw sensor data as provided by SOS and require actionable knowledge of the environment in order to be practically useful. There are two approaches to deal with this obstacle, make the applications smarter or make the data smarter. We propose the latter option and accomplish this by leveraging semantic technologies in order to provide and apply more meaningful representation of sensor data. More specifically, we are modeling the domain of sensors and sensor observations in a suite of ontologies, adding semantic annotations to the sensor data, using the ontology models to reason over sensor observations, and extending an open source SOS implementation with our semantic knowledge base. This semantically enabled SOS, or SemSOS, provides the ability to query high-level knowledge of the environment as well as low-level raw sensor data.
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The vast majority of advances in sensor network research over the last five years have focused on the development of a series of small-scale (100s of nodes) testbeds and special-ized applications (e.g., environmental monitoring, etc.) that are built on low-powered sensor devices that self-organize to form application-specific multihop wireless networks. We believe that sensor networks have reached an important cross-roads in their development. The question we address in this paper is how to propel sensor networks from their small-scale application-specific network origins, into the commer-cial mainstream of people's every day lives; the challenge being: how do we develop large-scale general-purpose sen-sor networks for the general public (e.g., consumers) capable of supporting a wide variety of applications in urban set-tings (e.g., enterprises, hospitals, recreational areas, towns, cities, and the metropolis). We propose MetroSense, a new people-centric paradigm for urban sensing at the edge of the Internet, at very large scale. We discuss a number of challenges, interactions and characteristics in urban sens-ing applications, and then present the MetroSense architec-ture which is based fundamentally on three design princi-ples: network symbiosis, asymmetric design, and localized interaction. The ability of MetroSense to scale to very large areas is based on the use of an opportunistic sensor network-ing approach. Opportunistic sensor networking leverages mobility-enabled interactions and provides coordination be-tween people-centric mobile sensors, static sensors and edge wireless access nodes in support of opportunistic sensing, op-portunistic tasking, and opportunistic data collection. We discuss architectural challenges including providing sensing coverage with sparse mobile sensors, how to hand off roles and responsibilities between sensors, improving network per-formance and connectivity using adaptive multihop, and im-portantly, providing security and privacy for people-centric sensors and data.
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Mobile devices are commonly being employed by organizations to disseminate information. Universities are no different and use the technology in a range of situations from administration to teaching. The devices are themselves experiencing a growth in relation to their own complexity and consequently the type of information which can be retrieved, handled and delivered. This paper uses results of a previous investigation to analyze what can be represented on a range of common mobile devices from simple to custom-made applications and to what extent developments in IPv6, QoS, scalability, service agreements and limits in the range of changes in terms of hardware/software influence how the environments operate. The paper then discusses what future developments will be necessary in order to see an "ideal" achieved.
Chapter
The fragmented smartphone market with at least five important mobile platforms makes native development of mobile applications (apps) a challenging and costly endeavour. Cross-platform development might alleviate this situation. Several cross-platform approaches have emerged, which we classify in a first step. In order to compare concrete cross-platform solutions, we compiled a set of criteria to assess cross-platform development approaches. Based on these criteria, we evaluated Web apps, apps developed with PhoneGap or Titanium Mobile, and – for comparison – natively developed apps. We present our findings as reference tables and generalize our results. Our criteria have proven to be viable for follow-up evaluations. With regard to the approaches, we found PhoneGap viable if very close resemblance to a native look & feel can be neglected.
Conference Paper
The fragmented smartphone market with at least five important mobile platforms makes native development of mobile applications (apps) a challenging and costly endeavour. Cross-platform development might alleviate this situation. Several cross-platform approaches have emerged, which we classify in a first step. In order to compare concrete cross-platform solutions, we compiled a set of criteria to assess cross-platform development approaches. Based on these criteria, we evaluated Web apps, apps developed with PhoneGap or Titanium Mobile, and – for comparison – natively developed apps. We present our findings as reference tables and generalize our results. Our criteria have proven to be viable for follow-up evaluations. With regard to the approaches, we found PhoneGap viable if very close resemblance to a native look & feel can be neglected.
Article
Despite people's central role within smartphone sensing, such systems remain largely oblivious to the effects of social networks and community dynamics. How might smartphone sensing systems change if they could see more than isolated individuals? What if sensing systems could not only understand these social effects but could leverage them in their day-to-day operations — for example, as they collect and interpret mobile sensor data?