An architecture for adhesive mobile crowdsourcing application

Continual increase in household items prices has prompted the need to have a mechanism that enables comparison of prices to be made between different stores. Through the comparison, consumers are able to find stores that sell items at lower prices, hence helping them to save on their household expenditures. The success of this mechanism strongly relies on the timeliness and comprehensiveness of the prices information. Due to the large number of stores available and the nature of items prices that keep changing from time to time, ensuring the timeliness and comprehensiveness of the information is very challenging. Mobile crowdsourcing was therefore identified as the most suitable method to be used in addressing the challenge, because in mobile crowdsourcing, the information will be contributed by the consumers through their mobile devices. Hence, the sources of information are unlimited, both temporally and spatially. A critical success factor of this mechanism, which also holds true in any crowdsourcing-based application, is the volume of participating crowd, in this case, the consumers. Without their participation, the objective of any crowdsourcing activities cannot be achieved. Therefore, in this paper, an adhesive architecture for mobile crowdsourcing is proposed, which took into consideration the elements that can help in attracting consistent participation from the crowd.