EduBay: A mobile-based, Location-aware content sharing platform

Abstract

Most natural sciences streams (zoology, botany, anthropology, agriculture etc.) require collecting a lot of artifacts from natural environments to understand their properties such as shape, size and appearance. Currently this is done through what are called “field trips” where students and researchers go to different places and collect/study specimens from that unique habitat. These field trips are mostly very notional since logistically and monetarily they are not very scalable. The interesting locations for field trips may also be quite far and remote from the current user location. We present in this work a location based content brokering platform EduBay where we bring together the creators of content (researchers, students or local people who get photographs, videos of the specimens; audio such as bird sounds etc.) and the consumers of the content (fellow students and researchers who need these artifacts for their studies). EduBay is built around the mobile platform since collecting audio, video, or photographs from natural surroundings can leverage the camera, microphone, and other sensors on the mobile device. The platform strongly leverages the location sensor on the mobile device to connect a content to its creation location since most of these interesting artifacts can sometimes be found only in some unique locations. The platform presents interesting location centric views to the creator as well as to the consumer for easy discoverability and searching of the content. The platform also provides a mechanism to validate new content or ascertain the value of a content using peer group crowdsourcing. To keep the creation and consumption of the content under balance, the platform keeps check on the creation and consumption behavior of each user and incentivizes them to create good content as much as they consume them.