A Survey of Spatial Crowdsourcing

Abstract

Widespread use of advanced mobile devices has led to the emergence of a new class of crowdsourcing called spatial crowdsourcing. Spatial crowdsourcing advances the potential of a crowd to perform tasks related to real-world scenarios involving physical locations, which were not feasible with conventional crowdsourcing methods. The main feature of spatial crowdsourcing is the presence of spatial tasks that require workers to be physically present at a particular location for task fulfillment. Research related to this new paradigm has gained momentum in recent years, necessitating a comprehensive survey to offer a bird’s-eye view of the current state of spatial crowdsourcing literature. In this article, we discuss the spatial crowdsourcing infrastructure and identify the fundamental differences between spatial and conventional crowdsourcing. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive view of the existing literature by introducing a taxonomy, elucidate the issues/challenges faced by different components of spatial crowdsourcing, and suggest potential research directions for the future.