Crowdsensing and Citizen science are broad concepts that include the possibility of involving volunteers, usually non-experts, in some activities normally reserved for the scientific community.
Two main goals can be achieved with this approach:
- Increasing public awareness of issues such as environmental protection.
- Increasing the resources available to researchers and, above all, improving the temporal and geographical coverage of measurements.
The crowdsensing/citizen science approach has already been used in many areas of scientific research, but also in commercial services such as traffic visualisation in car navigation systems.
The COCAL system uses mobile control units developed by OGS and mounted on Trieste Trasporti (TPL FVG) buses and on volunteer cars for data collection.
There are currently around ten control units installed on TT buses, which are activated when the vehicles are in operation. The geographical and temporal coverage of the data is based on the programming requirements
of the bus line managent. Cocal is part of the OGS GENA Infrastructure for the management of IoT, Crowdsensing and Citizen Science data.
