Um ambiente colaborativo baseado em localização aplicável ao domínio de cidades inteligentes.

Abstract

Smart Cities solutions are currently being studied and applied by researchers and governments throughout the world with the purpose of better managing the problems found with the increase of urban populations and negative impacts suffered by the nature. The majority of the existing proposed models, however, use digital sensors for the gathering of the necessary information for its execution, which may interfere directly with the feasibility of its application on real world scenarios. At the same pace, with the fast evolution of technologies and easy access to GPS enabled devices, arises the opportunity of using geographical information to enrich various types of systems and improve their usability. Social Networks are one of these to benefit the most from such advances, taking advantage and providing more personalized services to their users. As a consequence, emerge the Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs), which represent location-aware social networks, and other similar collaborative content environments. This study proposes a Smart Cities solution based on a location-based collaborative environment called Crowd4City, which explores the spatial information available in order to provide an environment where the citizens (sensors) can express their dissatisfactions or give suggestions to improve their city, also helping government entities better plan new management strategies. Additionally, we also present a Reputation Model, to prevent one of the most common problems in collaborative content systems - spam dissemination - and visualization techniques, to improve the system's usability. The use and value of location-based collaborative environments in this context, with Crowd4City as a case study, are evaluated in this research.