Media Mapping: Using Georeferenced Images and Audio to provide supporting information for the Analysis of Environmental Sensor Datasets

Abstract

Field based environmental monitoring projects often fail to gather supporting temporal information on the surroundings, yet these external factors may play a significant part in understanding variations in the collected datasets. For example when sampling air quality the values may change as a result of a bus passing the sampling point, yet this temporal local information is difficult to capture at a con-sistently high resolution over extended time periods. Here we develop an applica-tion which runs on a mobile phone able to capture visual and audio data with cor-responding time and location details. We also develop a desktop analysis tool which synchronises the display of this dataset with those captured from environ-mental sensors. The result is a tool able to assist researchers in understanding local changes in environmental datasets as a result of changes in the nearby surrounding environment.