GeoCrowd: enabling query answering with spatial crowdsourcing

With the ubiquity of mobile devices, spatial crowdsourcing is emerging as a new platform, enabling spatial tasks (i.e., tasks related to a location) assigned to and performed by human workers. In this paper, for the first time we introduce a taxonomy for spatial crowdsourcing. Subsequently, we focus on one class of this taxonomy, in which workers send their locations to a centralized server and thereafter the server assigns to every worker his nearby tasks with the objective of maximizing the overall number of assigned tasks. We formally define this maximum task assignment (or MTA) problem in spatial crowdsourcing, and identify its challenges. We propose alternative solutions to address these challenges by exploiting the spatial properties of the problem space. Finally, our experimental evaluations on both real-world and synthetic data verify the applicability of our proposed approaches and compare them by measuring both the number of assigned tasks and the travel cost of the workers.

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