Mobile platform for exploring the potential of volunteered geographic information for asset register

Abstract

The advancement of mobile communication technologies nowadays, such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), has enables participation by volunteers (often non-professional) to produce, share, and consume geographic information. Such participation is termed as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), which is loosely known as crowdsourcing. This paper describes a proposed mobile platform that explores the potential of exploiting volunteers to produce geographic information related to stationary assets of an electricity utility company in the country. The paper begins with a brief discussion on the principles of crowdsourcing and VGI. This is followed by reviews of four commonly cited applications, which rely on volunteers for their geographic information. The design, development and future work of the proposed mobile application are elaborated in this paper.