Title:
Location-based Mobile Games for Crowdsourcing Data in the OpenMobileNetwork

Description:
The OpenMobileNetwork [1] is a project, which collects and provides datasets about mobile networks and devices. It is semantically modeled using the Linked Data principles. It provides structured RDF data describing mobile networks, their topology and components (e.g., base stations, mobile devices or WiFi access points). The data available in the OpenMobileNetwork can be updated and extended by utilizing smartphone clients in a crowdsourcing approach, which collect cell data and send them to the OpenMobileNetwork server. Such a crowdsourcing approach, however, can only be established if a noticeable number of users contribute with their data by using such a data-collecting smartphone app.
Motivating people to use such an app turns out to be very difficult as long as there is no obvious benefit for them in contributing with their data. Furthermore, they usually reject using apps that mainly aggregate private data for no obvious reason. In order to create an incentive for the user to use such an app, a location-based mobile game can be designed and implemented that utilizes data from the OpenMobileNetwork and indirectly makes the user participate in updating and extending the dataset. This can be achieved by using well-known game patterns like „Search-and-Find“, „Follow-the-Path“ or „Chase-and-Catch“ and by intelligently leading the user to places where updated data is needed.

The objective of this thesis is to analyze and evaluate different location-based mobile game patterns that effectively enable data acquisition in general and in the context of the OpenMobileNetwork. Afterwards, a game should be designed and implemented that utilizes data available in the OpenMobileNetwork and that acquires new or updated data in the background.

Challenges:

• Research on Linked Data, crowdsourcing, location-based mobile games, game mechanics and fundamentals on motivation
• Develop an abstract API to geographically optimize distributed data collection
• Design and implementation of an interesting location-based mobile game

Prerequisites:

• Interest to work in the field of Mobile Networks, Positioning Methods and Location-based Mobile Games
• Interest to work in the field of Linked Data
• Proficiency in programming

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Axel Küpper [2], Abdulbaki Uzun [3], Ulrich Bareth [4]

Type: Bachelor Thesis

Duration: 4 months