Indoor Place Name Annotations with Mobile Crowd

With the popularity of mobile devices, numerous mobile applications have been and will continue to be developed for various interesting usage scenarios. Riding this trend, recent research community envisions a novel information retrieving and information-sharing platform, which views the users with mobile devices and being willing to accept crowd sourcing tasks as crowd sensors. With the neat idea, a set of crowd sensors applications have emerged. Among the applications, the geospatial information systems based on crowd sensors show significant potentials beyond traditional ones by providing real time geospatial information. In the applications, user positioning is of great importance. However, existing positioning techniques have their own disadvantages. In this paper, we study using pervasive Wi-Fi access point as a position indicator. The major challenge for using Wi-Fi access point is that there is no mechanism for mapping observed Wi-Fi signals to human-defined places. To this end, our idea is to employ crowd sourcing model to perform place name annotations by mobile participants to bridge the gap between signals and human-defined places. In this paper, we propose schemes for effectively enabling based-based place name annotation, and conduct real trials with recruited participants to study the effectiveness of the proposed schemes. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes over existing solutions.