CrowdManager: An Ontology-Based Interaction and Management Middleware for Heterogeneous Mobile Crowd Sensing

With the enrichment of types and numbers of sensing terminals, more and more devices such as mobile phones, smart wearables, mobile robots, drones have appeared in our life, enabling the development of Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) technology. MCS systems has gradually changed from isomorphic sensing to heterogeneous collaborative sensing, and finally evolved into a heterogeneous multi-source sensing mode of the fusion of humans, machines and objects (things). However, state-of-the-art systems/frameworks do not well support efficient interactions and Heterogeneous Crowd Agents (HCA) management in Heterogeneous MCS (H-MCS) systems. With this in mind, this article aims at two major gaps: Efficient interaction and collaboration of HCA, automated modeling and flexible management of HCA. To deal with the challenges, we design an ontology-based interaction and management middleware (CrowdManager). Three core modules that constitute the middleware: HCA Information Extraction and Representation (HER), Ontology-based HCA Construction & Management (OCM), and Communication and Interaction Module (CIM) are well demonstrated. Extensive comparative evaluation suggests that our approach not only brings rich and efficient HCA management and interactive functions to H-MCS systems, but also reduces communication time and various resource occupancy rates by more than 50%.