DisCoPar: Distributed components for participatory campaigning

Participatory sensing provides the enabling technology to deploy community-based environmental monitoring and information systems, also known as citizen observatories. Even though these observatories all share a similar structure, constructing a new citizen observatory for a new type of data requires all software infrastructure to be rebuilt from scratch. In this paper we introduce DisCoPar, our component based system inspired by flow-based programming, that aims to provide a component library for constructing citizen observatories. Due to the high reconfigurability and reusability on different levels of our system, we ensure that all the features of a citizen observatory can be implemented. This includes data gathering features of currently existing participatory sensing applications, data aggregation methods, and participant coordination. This participant coordination and collaboration is facilitated due to the highly reactive nature of our flow-based system.