A GIS-based crowdsourcing iPhone Application to Report Necessities, Civic Issues, and Public Events

Abstract: Civic issues in a society can be reported through a crowdsourcing web application. People can download the application on their smartphones and report the issues such as a pothole or broken streetlight. The report is submitted by taking a photo of the issue and additional information is entered. At first, the reports are submitted to a call center and after analyzing they will be transferred to organizations responsible for this type of events. In such a crowdsourcing project it is very vital to motivate people to participate in the project. The reports are supplied by users and without an acceptable number of users the application would be useless. In addition, having the exact location of a report is very helpful to facilitate the process of solving civic issues. Positioning with smartphones is not very accurate as they do not have strong and accurate GPSs. Therefore, there is a need to improve the accuracy of the positioning process and consequently accuracy of the spatial data. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how to employ GIS to help reporting civic issues and how to design an interesting client interface for such an application, in order to motivate user to download and use it. The goal is also to find out shortcomings and weaknesses of the positioning with smartphones and find a way to improve its accuracy.Some of successful similar applications’ structures and their interfaces were reviewed. In addition, a survey among existing users of crowdsourcing applications has been done in order to find out how to design the application to be interesting for users. Furthermore, some techniques and methods were chosen in order to improve the GPS accuracy especially in the places with a low GPS signal strength. These methods exploit WLAN and some of embedded features in a smartphone such as microphone, camera, accelerometer, gyroscope to improve the positioning accuracy. In the end, along reporting civic issues the user is able to report and get information about cheap and appropriate necessities and public events in different geographical areas through a map-based application. Furthermore, he or she is benefited by some location-based services such as online-food or taxi. The client application’s interface was designed for iPhone.This GIS-based mobile application would be an appropriate alternative for the old reporting methods like phone call or mail. Nevertheless, reporting civic issues itself, cannot be necessarily a strong motivation to attract the user to download and use the application. Therefore, desired feedbacks of the crowd need to be found out in order to encourage them to spend their time for the application. User needs to get motivated to use the application and considered additional parts can be very helpful to reach this aim.