User-Generated Content & The Sensor Revolution

An excursion into the world of research: Combining user-generated content like geo-referenced messages or photos from social networks with sensor network content like traffic or wireless data is becoming a more and more important topic in research.

Imagine a world where every mobile phone has a variety of integrated sensors (voice, location, touch, accelerometer, temperature,...) and all retrieved data can be shared over wireless networks. You mobile phone can sense your current context, expose information to a smart space surrounding you (e.g. a smart fridge), share automatically information with your friends or warns you about activities happening nearby. This is a future that needs detailed analysis and many aspects from ethics to real-time control infrastructures are touched.

Relevancy for Tagcrumbs? None, but my new master thesis topic at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute is focusing on exploring urban dynamics from a technical perspective, especially the semantic data integration of user-generated content and sensor network data. It is always good to have some hints about the future and the local context and everything place-based is our daily Tagcrumbs business.

Click on the image above for a detailed view and try to combine any three of the words to find some ideas to found your own company and tell us about it. ;-) The image was as always generated by the great Wordle service. I just aggregated the most relevant keywords for my thesis.

By the way, after going through all the great feedback about Tagcrumbs by our early stage testers, we moved into a period of silent development but there will be many important changes in the next week. I am looking forward to it. The second testing period is coming closer which means deadline approaching, ahhh.

For SEO completeness here the list of the used words for this Wordle image:

urban dynamics digital footprinting sensor networks social networks semantic technologies wikicity real-time city urbanism system dynamics social citizen journalism citysense sensing citizen empowerment citizen science urban economics urban efficiency real-time systems mobile mobility mobile evolution iphone sensor location location-based services lbs earthquake digital cities urbanization spatiotemporal geospatial geo events map mapping neogeography place-based conversation places disaster scenarios urban informatics data integration semantics web 2.0 semantic web pervasive systems real-time control system real-time urban environment semantic reality semantic sensor networks web services semantic web services dynamics mobile 2.0 mobile internet future social android ubicomp ubiquitous computing senseable city lab sensor data diffusion data visualization pervasiveness web science connectivity API activity vocabulary ontology urban planning urban development social media contributions user generated content ugc location-sensitive locative wireless emergence geo-awareness real-time infrastructure place annotations visualization geocoding reverse geocoding street view heat maps movement local local business tourism ambient sensing mobile web social placemarking ethics geo-referencing wireless networks gsm wifi communities georss location-sensitive what where when gps interfaces tags local authorities broadcast agents city wifi networks infotainment entrepreneurship public sensors traffic physical context real world mobile media sensor revolution participatory planning digital traces urban space