Mobile Data Collection Using Open Data Kit

Abstract

In an era where mobile devices are spreading around the world and becoming cheaper, many organizations are turning to mobile data collection. Open Data Kit (ODK) is one of the most well known mobile data collection framework. ODK has two suites of software: ODK and ODK-X. The purpose of this paper is to propose two architectures, one for ODK and an other for ODK-X (formely ODK 2); these architectures show data trajectories from the creation of the forms until to collected data visualization, and also help the user to choose between these two suites, the one that best fits his needs and context. In addition, this paper present a comparative study of several mobile data collection systems. This comparative study concluded that, among plenty frameworks, ODK and ODK-X are the ones that offer a complete and fully open source mobile data collection solution.