Towards Citizen-Powered Cyberworlds for Environmental Monitoring

ICT advances in emerging domains such as Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality/ Virtual Reality (AR/VR), big data analytics, cyber-physical systems and cloud computing have revolutionized and boosted the creation of cyberworlds as information spaces that allow us to augment the way we interact with each other and with the physical world. Naturally, other than businesses cyberworlds can benefit modern hyper connected societies at their entirety (transport, mobility, health, smart living, etc.) and further to that the physical world around us can also be part of such process. In the present paper the focus is given on citizen-powered cyberworlds for Environmental Monitoring which are created from crowdsourced observations engaging, through gamification, citizens and communities. The means of engagement include serious gaming, collection of geo-tagged IoT, such as images, video and sensor measurements as well as management and storage of diverse IoT as OGC compliant observations all conveyed into a dedicated information space.