Collaborative information gathering and recommendation using mobile computing

The increasing adoption of mobile devices can improve the collaborative participation, especially in data acquiring, of people in their space: where they live or where they work. Based in this kind of crowdsourcing, we create a proposal for The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), specially its campus of “Ilha do Fundão” (Fundão Island), which has a fragmented culture since its origin. Nowadays, it is still possible to find not only a geographical distance, but also informational disaggregation and waste of resources and opportunities. In order to minimize these problems, as well motivating the collaborative work, we create an approach using mobile computing, called UFRJ Social. The main idea is that the crowd (students, professor, employers, visitors and anyone who stay in the campus) can provide information or opinions of any place (infrastructure, events, classes, bus stations and others). This application is context-sensitive, and users can receive recommendations by their geographical location and interests. This approach was evaluated in a study case and the results were positive. In this paper we also analyze how this approach can be extended in other scenarios.