Web 2.0 Broker: A standards-based service for spatio-temporal search of crowd-sourced information

Abstract

Recent trends in information technology show that citizens are increasingly willing to share information using tools provided by Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing platforms to describe events that may have social impact. This is fuelled by the proliferation of location-aware devices such as smartphones and tablets; users are able to share information in these crowdsourcing platforms directly from the field at real time, augmenting this information with its location. Afterwards, to retrieve this information, users must deal with the different search mechanisms provided by the each Web 2.0 services. This paper explores how to improve on the interoperability of Web 2.0 services by providing a single service as a unique entry to search over several Web 2.0 services in a single step. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of the Open Geospatial Consortium's OpenSearch Geospatial and Time specification as an interface for a service that searches and retrieves information available in crowdsourcing services. We present how this information is valuable in complementing other authoritative information by providing an alternative, contemporary source. We demonstrate the intrinsic interoperability of the system showing the integration of crowd-sourced data in different scenarios.