Crowdsensing for road sustainability: validation of publicly sourced data for exploitation

Crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are social innovation paradigms that, through the participation of active citizens, allow communities to contribute to a shared goal and provide people with tools with the capacity to positively impacting society. Mobile crowdsensing in particular takes advantage of pervasive mobile devices with on-board sen- sors to enable efficient and inexpensive large-scale data collection. In this paper we present results from several public pilots of a crowdsensing system deployed with the purpose of collecting road quality data thanks to accelerometer data from mobile smartphones. We il- lustrate several approaches that aim at evaluating the quality of collected information and correlating it with real “ground truth” data from a variety of sources. Proposed approaches are evaluated in terms of effectiveness and applicability in exploitation processes by public administrations or other road maintenance entities.