Social network for human-based environmental monitoring

The use of a social network for monitoring a geographic area introduces the possibility of realizing new applications. Monitoring wide areas with video-surveillance and remote sensing techniques is extremely expensive in relation to the spatial and temporal resolution. This means involving inhabitants, workers and visitors of parks, urban and heritage wide areas in environmental monitoring process. In this paper the idea is integrating data from human activity with web-based technologies. The aim is designing a social network for sharing and publishing images and comments about the monitored environment. The social network presents communication instruments characterized by the simplification of the interface between the application and the registered users. To this end a tool for evaluating images and comments submitted through simple communication instruments - such as: Multimedia Message Services (MMS) and Short Message Service (SMS) - is integrated.