Improving Accessibility through Semantic Crowdsourcing

Mainstream crowdsourcing applications for rating the accessibility of places are usually very limited in scope as only a small number of people are willing to participate, mostly the ones already interested in consuming this kind of information. We propose an extension of the schema.org ontology as a new crowdsourcing approach for engaging and motivating a larger population to participate in evaluating the accessibility of a place. An architecture of the proposed model is presented and its details are discussed. This extension has the potential to drastically improve the accessibility evaluation paradigm, as it has advantages not only for the persons who consume the data, but as well to those who describe the accessibility features of a place, especially business owners.