SensorWebBike - A Partecipatory Urban Sensing for Air Quality Monitoring

Sustainable development and effective environmental policies are key to ensure public safety and health. People feel safer in their cities when national and local government are clearly committed with a better environmental governance, building public trust and transparency. Urban environmental monitoring is a driving force to set up continuous information services and applications to improve day-to-day lives of individuals and communities. Pollutant concentration monitoring based on emission models, weather and traffic conditions requires integration of data at different spatiotemporal scale to better respond the growing demand of finer-grained information on urban environment. These data, may be made available from different sources, as local and national spatial data infrastructures could be positively integrated by a participatory involvement of diverse stakeholders, including citizens. As a matter of fact the web 2.0 revolution is transforming the information production, distribution and consumption models, where citizens/individuals are key players and have a plenty of tools and solutions to generate content and data. In the last few years from a distributed problem-solving model crowdsourcing, regardless any cliché in the global talks and chattering, has become a new paradigm involving both every-day life and science with a wide range of effects. (e.g. crisis mashups) Citizens contribution are an opportunity that scientific community is becoming aware of [Goodchild 2007] however the challenge is now to integrate the user generated content in the wider framework of validation and reliability . This paper presents the SensorWebBike, a web-based information service framework designed to support an open sensing and participative approach for urban environmental monitoring. Bikers become voluntary citizens-sensors able to measure environmental parameters, by using a small sensor's box - an innovative low-cost mobile device - mounted on their bikes. The main aim of this research is to investigate the technical methods with which informal SDI of research centres can integrate and process the data and information from communities and develop and provide the new reliable data, information and knowledge. The overall aim is to share a participatory monitoring tools and services to help scientists to understand the monitored large spatial phenomena, which can seldom be detected by static air quality and meteorological stations, or helping others users by providing real-time collective environmental mapping.