This study investigated the development of a Webbased
Participatory GIS (PGIS) providing access to
field-collected information. Exploiting the idea of
participatory sensing (Burke et al. 2006), which conceives
human beings as a network of continuouslymonitoring
sensors, a sample of users was instructed
on how to use their mobile devices in order to gather
georeferenced data related to road pavement damages.
User-generated content was stored and managed
into a spatial database and then Web published
as a WMS layer. Two main innovations can be
pointed out with respect to PGIS literature. The first
is represented by system access from mobile devices,
which allow to spatially interact with data by means
of touch commands. Ad hoc versions were developed
for both the large-screen tablets and the smallscreen
smartphones. Secondly, the implemented architecture
was fully developed with Free and Open
Source Software (FOSS) tools, which proved to be
suitable for the research objective.