Mobile Based Crowd sourcing for Agricultural Market Information
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Date
2015-02
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The availability of market information is vital for individuals and countries’ economic growth. By its nature market information is dynamic and its source is distributed among the public and must be communicated so that all stakeholders get access to it. In Ethiopia’s case, agricultural information, especially agro-market information, is important due to the fact that Ethiopia depends on agriculture. Sadly, there is an information gap between the various stakeholders, namely the farmer and the business man regarding market information.
In order to overcome such problem, we have proposed and implemented a mobile based crowdsourcing system for agro market information. The aim of our proposed system is to process and provide aggregated and updated agricultural market price information which is provided by the crowd using SMS messaging that is available in Java based mobile phone devices. Our proposed system has five basic components which are: SMS Manager Component, Information Extraction component, Data analysis component, Crowd Management and Request Management component.
As a means of evaluating the proposed architecture, we developed a prototype that implements the components of the proposed architecture. We also evaluated the implementation by testing sample SMS messages. Results from the evaluation showed that the proposed architecture can provide a mobile based crowdsourcing system for agro market information for low end mobile phone users with price aggregation performance of 72%.
Key words: Crowdsourcing, Agricultural Market Information, Ontology, Information Extraction, Mobile Based Crowdsourcing
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Keywords
Crowdsourcing; Agricultural Market Information; Ontology; Information Extraction; Mobile Based Crowdsourcing