The rapid expansion of social media has significantly differentiated how users interact with the Internet, particularly in terms of communication, entertainment and information. In this context, crowdsourcing technologies have found fertile ground. The term crowdsourcing refers to mechanisms for creating services and content by aggregating individual contributions from a large user population.

Recognizing the enormous potential that crowdsourcing can offer in modern navigation systems, the SBOING4REAL project aims to develop innovative technologies for the geo-sensitive social networking of people who use navigation devices and for the exchange of additional real-time navigation information to improve vehicular navigation. The proposed system will operate based on SBOING’s existing navigator, sbNavi™, and complementary to the offline routing and navigation functionality sbNavi provides to date, adding new functionality and providing the following new services:

• Geo-sensitive social networking of users. Specialized social tools will be provided that will serve the users and their social networking process. B.C. To inform a particular social circle of the user (e.g. his colleagues) when he / she encounters increased traffic, shorter route reporting, statistical confirmation of the information collected.

• Real-time navigation information contributed by the users themselves. The information provided will relate to accidents, traffic conditions, road infrastructure, emergencies, etc., and will be contributed both automatically (e.g. by transmitting the speed vector) and by the users, via easy-to-use user interfaces at the navigation device.

• Updating in real time the users of the navigator for the current traffic conditions in their area. This service will update the browser by providing up-to-date traffic load data for improved routing. This data will be updated in real-time, based on information coming from crowdsourcing, after it has been processed and filtered by the central servers. The updated data will be provided selectively to each user according to their location, i.e., after having correlated their location coordinates with the geographical location of the user.

• Support for additional information interfaces. Real-time updating will not only be limited to the navigation application, but will also extend to other interfaces, such as real-time subscriber feeds (RSS), which will provide general web browser based traffic updates.

Finally, the project will transfer to the company the intellectual property rights of the relevant international patent (in 18 countries), thus significantly increasing the company’s valuation and its investment value.

Besides SBOING, 3 research organizations participate in the project:
a) Department of Informatics, AUTh,
b) International Hellenic University,
c) Hellenic Institute of Transport and Sustainable Mobility of CERTH.

The project will be implemented in 4 phases:

1. Overview of current state-of-the-art, Requirements Analysis and determination of the 2. Final Assessment and Control Plan.
3. Design and implementation of individual sub-systems. It includes the design and implementation of:
a) the client application,
b) the communication between the navigator and the central servers, and
c) the central processing and data diffusion mechanisms.
3. Integration & testing of the final system.
4. Confirmation of the systems functionality with a pilot test, to be prescribed and executed by the Hellenic Institute of Transport.