title: Crowdsourcing, citizen sensing and sensor web technologies for public and environmental health surveillance and crisis management: trends, OGC standards and application examples.
abstract: 'Wikification of GIS by the masses' is a phrase-term first coined by Kamel Boulos in 2005, two years earlier than Goodchild's term 'Volunteered Geographic Information'. Six years later (2005-2011), OpenStreetMap and Google Earth (GE) are now full-fledged, crowdsourced 'Wikipedias of the Earth' par excellence, with millions of users contributing their own layers to GE, attaching photos, videos, notes and even 3-D (three dimensional) models to locations in GE. From using Twitter in participatory sensing and bicycle-mounted sensors in pervasive environmental sensing, to creating a 100,000-sensor geo-mashup using Semantic Web technology, to the 3-D visualisation of indoor and outdoor surveillance data in real-time and the development of next-generation, collaborative natural user interfaces that will power the spatially-enabled public health and emergency situation rooms of the future, where sensor data and citizen reports can be triaged and acted upon in real-time by distributed teams of professionals, this paper offers a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of the overlapping domains of the Sensor Web, citizen sensing and 'human-in-the-loop sensing' in the era of the Mobile and Social Web, and the roles these domains can play in environmental and public health surveillance and crisis/disaster informatics. We provide an in-depth review of the key issues and trends in these areas, the challenges faced when reasoning and making decisions with real-time crowdsourced data (such as issues of information overload, "noise", misinformation, bias and trust), the core technologies and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards involved (Sensor Web Enablement and Open GeoSMS), as well as a few outstanding project implementation examples from around the world.
authors.affiliation: University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon, UK. mnkamelboulos@plymouth.ac.uk
authors.forename: Maged N
authors.initials: MN
authors.lastname: Kamel Boulos
authors.forename: Bernd
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Resch
authors.forename: David N
authors.initials: DN
authors.lastname: Crowley
authors.forename: John G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Breslin
authors.forename: Gunho
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sohn
authors.forename: Russ
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Burtner
authors.forename: William A
authors.initials: WA
authors.lastname: Pike
authors.forename: Eduardo
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Jezierski
authors.forename: Kuo-Yu Slayer
authors.initials: KY
authors.lastname: Chuang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003199:Computer Systems; D003441:Crowding; D003625:Data Collection / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D004782:Environmental Health / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D040362:Geographic Information Systems / Q000295:instrumentation; D014943:Global Health; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional; D020407:Internet / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000458:organization & administration*; D019359:Knowledge; D008328:Man-Machine Systems; D008490:Medical Informatics; D011159:Population Surveillance / Q000379:methods*; D011634:Public Health / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D061108:Social Media / Q000295:instrumentation; D012984:Software; D006113:United Kingdom