Emerging Ubiquitous Knowledge Services: From Mobile Sensing to Ubiquitous Crowdsourcing and Beyond

Recent advances of information and communication technologies (e.g., smartphones and Web 2.0) have facilitated ubiquitous sensing and networked collaboration among people. This trend has significantly lowered the knowledge transfer barriers and has broadened the range of knowledge services, thus enabling new types of services called “ubiquitous knowledge services.” The goal of ubiquitous knowledge services is to seamlessly integrate content (e.g., data, information, knowledge) from various sources (e.g., content providers, sensors, smart devices, humans) at large scales and to derive new values for end users in ways that the contributor of the content even did not plan or imagine. In this chapter, we review the key enabling technologies of ubiquitous knowledge services and the existing integrated platforms on sensor data collection, retrieval, and application services. Also, we propose a set of desirable features of the ubiquitous knowledge service platforms based on our vision of the knowledge communications service (KCS).