QoWater: A crowd-sourcing approach for assessing the water quality

This paper presents QoWater, a novel user-centric crowdsourcing system that enables mobile users to evaluate the quality of drinking, recreational, and irrigation water. The QoWater follows a client-to-server architecture. Via QoWater clients, users upload their feedback about the water quality, together with their position and a timestamp in the spatio-temporal database of QoWater. At the same time, a wireless sensor network monitors the water distribution network (WDN) and uploads the measurements to the QoWater database. We have developed a proof-of-concept implementation of QoWater and performed a preliminary analysis. The paper also highlights the research directions and challenges for developing a robust and effective mechanism.