Crowdsourcing Research for Social Insights into Smart Cities Applications and Services

The evolution in knowledge management and crowdsourcing research provides new data-processing capabilities. The availability of both structured and unstructured open data formats offers unforeseen opportunities for analytics processing and advanced decision-making. However, social sciences research is facing advanced, complicated social challenges and problems. The focus of this study is to analyze the contribution of crowdsourcing techniques to the promotion of advanced social sciences research, exploiting open data available from the geographical positioning system (GPS) to analyze human behavior. In our study, we present the conceptual design of a device that, with the help of a global positioning system-data collection device (GPS-DCD), associates behavioral aspects of human life with place. The main contribution of this study is to integrate research in computer science and information systems with that in social science. The prototype system summarized in this work, proves the capacity of crowdsourcing and big data research to facilitate aggregation of microcontent related to human behavior toward improved quality of life and well-being in modern smart cities. Various ethical issues are also discussed to promote the scientific debate on this matter. Our study shows the capacity of emerging technologies to deal with social challenges. This kind of research will gain increased momentum in the future due to the availability of big data and new business models for social platforms.