Mobile Crowd Sensing for Solidarity Campaigns

Abstract

We present an ongoing project (This work is partially supported by the InfoCrowds project-PTDC/ECM-TRA/1898/2012 This work is supported by CISUC, via national funding by the FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia.) which has two separate strands, one refers to the technological study about the applicability of high performance and high availability technologies in Web Services and the other is directed to a practical application of these technologies to solidarity campaigns in collecting goods. The focus of this paper is in the first one, a technological study where several frameworks for building Web Services, databases of different types and libraries to assist in obtaining product codes (barcodes) and data are analyzed, this includes a study of performance, availability and reliability, as well as appraisals for each one. Besides this, we introduce an experimental setup and results obtained so far in a third sector institution, Caritas Diocesana of Coimbra (http://www.caritas.pt/site/nacional/ Portuguese Website (last visited in March 2015)), a non-profit organization part of Caritas (http://www.caritas.eu/ (last visited in March 2015)). As main contribution, we propose a distributed architecture for Mobile Crowd Sensing able not only to allow real time inventory through simultaneous campaigns but also it gives feedback to volunteers in order to instantly acquire information about which categories of goods are more needed.