Abstract

The dominance of internet and World Wide Web in the contemporary world is undeniable. This nature of the technology has given birth to E-Commerce which has penetrated into most or all types of businesses. The World Wide Web also acts as a huge platform for marketing these businesses and wide range of services. The advent of mobile devices has only helped in the evolution of E-Commerce, helping to reach out to a wider audience.

At the heart of the success of any product lies its ability to listen closely to their customer’s needs and complaints. In other words, collection and analysis of valuable data from users or customers is the key. This need also poses a problem of how to accomplish the data collection task without having to lose the essence of the users' feedback or to gather the most accurate data possible.

This thesis project designs a new system which takes a new approach of gathering sensitive data from users. It takes advantage of the ubiquitous nature, location awareness of mobile devices and prevalent web technologies to collect and analyze contextual data from the user. The system allows the creation of survey forms which can be tagged to desired locations in the geographic space. The information gathering process is triggered when a mobile user, who has registered to the system, enters any of these defined locations. The process involves having these mobile users take part in real-time surveys tagged to locations that the user enters. This crowd-sourced data can later be used to analyze, assess an event or gather feedback about the place or location in question.