Towards a Reusable Infrastructure for Crowdsourcing

In the course of the last few years crowd sourcing has received growing research focus due to its conception of solving complex tasks with the help of a flexible group of contributors of whom each needs to only contribute a simpler task part. Hence, the crowd can contribute by collecting data from distributed locations, completing map information, or voting on product ideas, et cetera. However, even though it is a necessary conceptual feature, the participation of large numbers of users with heterogeneous devices, generic infrastructures for crowd sourcing can hardly be found. For example, the management of users, mobile devices and contributed data has to be repetitively implemented in new projects. To ease the development of crowd sourcing applications, in this paper we propose a generic platform for simplified crowd sourcing deployment while supporting diverse crowd sourcing scenarios, the ability to handle large numbers of users and the involvement of heterogeneous mobile devices. The focus therein is put on the deployment process. Hence, the evaluation is based on an actual deployment, namely the migration of Cyface, an existing crowd sourcing project build from scratch, into using our proposed infrastructure.