A Proposed Taxonomy of Mobile Public Utility Applications

Gavina Baralla

, Katiuscia Mannaro

and Michele Marchesi

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, Piazza D’Armi, Cagliari, Italy

Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Cagliari, Via Ospedale 72, Cagliari, Italy

Keywords:

Taxonomy, Mobile Applications, Knowledge Sharing, e-Government, Public Administration.

Abstract:

During the last years, the number of applications for mobile devices have greatly increased, as well as the

number of developed services. Taxonomies provide an important tool to classify and help to understand this

complex domain, describing it in a simpler way. This paper presents a taxonomy of services for a new class

type of mobile applications that we called Mobile Public Utility, MPU. We contribute to research by providing

a ﬁrst classiﬁcation scheme to the scenario of MPU App usage by depicting his special nature because not

only this mobile application enables citizen to have a dialog with local authorities about environment safety or

security, but also it improves trust through better interaction with Public Administrations and it enhances the

decision-making process by local governments.

1 INTRODUCTION

Mobile devices like smartphone or tablet are getting

more powerful and they are gaining fundamental im-

portantance in everyday life. According to a recent

Gartner

report, the worldwide sales of smartphones

has grown by 9% in the ﬁrst quarter of 2017 reach-

ing 380 million units. Mobile phone buyers are will-

ing to spend more money for better devices in or-

der to install great mobile applications (Apps). The

smartphone usage is linked to the number of services

involved typically concern social media networking,

ﬁnancial transaction, email, information warehouse,

entertainment like movies and music apps. This ex-

traordinary new world represents an exceptional chal-

lenge for developers willing to create new mobile ap-

plications (Cocco et al., 2014).

In order to ensure better services the use of wire-

less digital technology has grown rapidly in the last

decades. This gives a substantial increase of installed

high frequency base stations attracting citizens’ atten-

tion about problem caused by electromagnetic radia-

tion poisoning. In particular, the increased daily expo-

sure to these sources ﬁelds has generated in the public

opinion a growing concern about health risks (Cousin

and Siegrist, 2010), (SCENIHR, 2015).

This growing demand for information about the

Gartner, Inc. is an American research and ad-

visory ﬁrm providing information technology. See:

http://www.gartner.com

risks arising from exposure to electromagnetic ﬁelds,

and the increased sensitivity to this issue both by citi-

zens and local authorities, has resulted in requests for

information and controls to guarantee public health

(Organization et al., 2002). We developed Onde

Chiare App, (Mannaro and Ortu, 2016), a mobile ap-

plication enables to directly provide information to

the people in an effective and transparent way, show-

ing a complete and timely dashboard of electromag-

netic ﬁeld levels in the urbanized areas.

To the best of our knowledge, there is no work in

literature that addresses these kind of application both

from the design point of view and in terms of taxon-

omy. Mobile applications can be categorised in sev-

eral ways, and to our knowledge there is insufﬁcient

information on exactly what types of classiﬁcation are

more appropriate for each use. Until now, there have

been some attempts to develop taxonomies for mo-

bile applications (See: (Dombroviak and Ramnath,

2007), (Nickerson et al., 2009), (Nickerson et al.,

2013), (Kennedy-Eden and Gretzel, 2012), (Shroff

et al., 2015)), but there is no taxonomy which has

been generated for a speciﬁc mobile app such as Onde

Chiare App.

In particular, Nickerson et al. (Nickerson et al.,

2009) created a taxonomy of mobile apps based on

the meta-characteristic of the interactions between the

user and the app. Starting from the work of Nickerson

(Nickerson et al., 2009), we propose here a taxonomy

that classiﬁes the speciﬁc services offered by Onde

Baralla G., Mannaro K. and Marchesi M.

A Proposed Taxonomy of Mobile Public Utility Applications.

DOI: 10.5220/0006583902410246

In Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (KMIS 2017), pages 241-246

ISBN: 978-989-758-273-8

Chiare App.

This paper makes the following contributions: i)

we discuss a novel kind of mobile application named

Onde Chiare , as a tool to reduce risk perception on

electromagnetic ﬁeld (EMF) and to ﬁll the knowledge

gap between the public and the experts about the ef-

fects of mobile phone radiations on human health; ii)

we propose a taxonomy that classiﬁes the services of-

fered by this type of application; iii) we contribute to

both the academic discussion and the practical world

by providing a framework for other researchers and

managers. The organization of the paper is as fol-

lows. Section 1 provides an introduction, and the mo-

tivations for the paper. Section 2 discusses the back-

ground on a speciﬁc class of mobile applications, with

special emphasis on recent mobile application fea-

tures, and related works about taxonomy of mobile

applications. In Section 3 we classify a novel kind

of mobile app we called Mobile Public Utility (MPU)

app within the taxonomy developed by Nickerson et

al. (Nickerson et al., 2013). In Section 4 we develop

a taxonomy of MPU services and then we present a

classiﬁcation of services based on different users. Fi-

nally in Section 5 we present conclusions and some

future directions for further research in this domain

of study.

2 STATE OF THE ART AND

RELATED WORK

This section highlights and discusses some tax-

onomies for the classiﬁcation of mobile application

and then brieﬂy discusses the state-of-the-art of mo-

bile application developed in terms of environment

safety or security.

A Taxonomy is a powerful tool for classifying a

domain content. It helps to understand better the hier-

archies and relationships between elements. A Taxon-

omy is a map of a knowledge domain, in recent years,

different types of taxonomies in the mobile area have

been proposed.

Tarute et al. (Tarute et al., 2017) investigated how

to design mobile applications based on user prefer-

ences to better understand which features stimulate

consumer engagement. Riggs and Gordon (Riggs

and Gordon, 2017) provided a taxonomy, about mo-

bile technology, as a tool for increasing transactive

exchanges between local government and citizens in

the future. Kennedy-Eden and Gretzel (Kennedy-

Eden and Gretzel, 2012) proposed a taxonomy of

mobile apps in tourism domain from two point per-

spectives to provide insights into app development

trends from a marketing perspective. Ernsting et al.

(Ernsting et al., 2017) explored the extent of smart-

phone and health app use, as potentially promising

tools to change health-related behaviors and manage

chronic conditions. Heinonen and Pura (Heinonen

and Pura, 2006) developed a conceptual classiﬁcation

for mobile services giving indications how to catego-

rize them from a customer centric perspective. Their

taxonomy evaluated important aspects that inﬂuence

mobile services, such as context, social settings and

type of consumption. In (Dombroviak and Ramnath,

2007) authors presented a taxonomy of mobile and

pervasive application based on abstracting application

characteristics.

In (Nickerson et al., 2013) Nickerson et al. sug-

gested an iterative method for taxonomy development

and they applied this method to mobile applications

domain. Starting from that work (Nickerson et al.,

2013), we propose here a taxonomy that classify the

speciﬁc services offered by a novel type of mobile ap-

plication: a mobile app that aims to promote a proper

form of active involvement of citizens, and real-time

information sharing of electromagnetic ﬁeld levels in

a given geographical area. Currently this application

is a prototype for Android designed and tested in-

ternally at the University (Mannaro and Ortu, 2016).

This novel kind of mobile applications, named ”Onde

Chiare” can be classiﬁed as Mobile Mobile Public

Utility (MPU App) and to our knowledge there is

no taxonomy in literature that has been generated for

this particular type of mobile app. In recent years,

several mobile applications in terms of environment

safety or security have been developed. Disaster Re-

porting

is a mobile app which allows users to report

disaster event such as blaze, building damage, land-

slide, with some related information. In the United

States and Canada different types of mobile applica-

tions classiﬁed as 311 services

are available. This

number supplies access to non-emergency municipal

services and information. Some examples are: ”Your-

GOV”, ”City Sourced”, ”Connected Bits”, ”EPA”,

”Orange County California Public Works”, ”Ping4”,

”SeeClickFix Inc”. This kind of mobile applications

can be classiﬁed as Mobile Environment Monitor-

ing app, users can report incidents, pollution, abusive

dumping, potential health risks and so on, but there

is not an interactive comunication with local govern-

ment. Public Administrations do not share their in-

formation in this type of applications and there is not

a Community aspect such as in MPU app. The main

contribution of this paper is to provide a taxonomy

Available at http://www.icimod.org/?q=18659

http://www.pwmag.com/mobile-technology/Mobile-

apps-for-public-works-professionals-contractors-and-

residents.aspx

that classiﬁes the services offered by a novel kind of

mobile application that we called Mobile Public Util-

ity and to contribute to both the academic discussion

and the practical world by providing a framework for

other researchers and managers.

3 A CASE OF MPU: Onde Chiare

APP

Onde Chiare is a prototype for Android we designed

and tested internally at the University. Onde Chiare

is a valuable tool to enable community members to

report speciﬁc information to the community, and to

improve the communication efforts by local author-

ities. Detailed description of Onde Chiare App can

be found in a previously published paper (Mannaro

and Ortu, 2016). In this section, only a brief descrip-

tion of the app will be presented before explaining the

classiﬁcation of this app in a new class that we called

MPU app. Onde Chiare aims to promote a proper

form of active involvement of citizens, and real-time

information sharing of electromagnetic ﬁeld levels in

a given geographical area. The typical scenario is rep-

resented by users carrying a smartphone loaded with

the Onde Chiare application and moving in a geo-

graphical area. Some services that the application can

manage are: i) Measurement of environmental data;

ii) Geolocation of the measurements; iii) Sending ge-

olocalized reports (i.e. broken antennas); iv) View ge-

olocalized information on the map. A remote server is

the part of the system demanded for the communica-

tion with the mobile application. It is responsible for

processing the geolocalized point received from the

application client. The remote servers response con-

tains information about the ﬁeld measure (either real

or estimated) in that area and the position of possible

electromagnetic pollution sources in the surrounding

area. In addition to the involvement of experts using

tracking technologies to read data and information re-

lated to the environmental status, active participation

of individual citizen has a fundamental role. Users

in this context are an active stakeholder of the sys-

tem, they can send report that can be shared. Users

report may be a real measure of environmental data,

i.e., an EMF measure, or more general report i.e., a

broken antenna or apparatus. These report are val-

idated by experts before being shared. Our mobile

application offers the possibility to every smartphone

owner of becoming part of a network of distributed

information made up of citizens interested in environ-

mental issues and quality of life related to the urban

area. The participation will take place through an ac-

tive use of the app. To the best of our knowledge, in

the app store there are no similar mobile applications

and they are not intended as tools of this type. Onde

Chiare will make it easier for citizens to report public-

facing issues, taking a picture, locate it, categorize it,

and quickly and conveniently notify to the appropri-

ate parties for a better response related to exposure to

electromagnetic ﬁelds, but also for more general is-

sues.

4 A TAXONOMY OF MPU

APPLICATION SERVICES

We indicated with term MPU apps all those applica-

tions that provide to users public utility services, and

allow also a dialog with local authorities. In our case,

we considered a particular MPU app that promotes

a proper form of active involvement of citizens and

the real-time information sharing of electromagnetic

ﬁeld levels in a given geographical area (Mannaro and

Ortu, 2016). Through the app, citizens can report a

problem directly to government ofﬁcials by snapping

a photo and sending a report, authorities receive the

report and can send a response. This mobile applica-

tion aims to make information accessible to the local

stakeholders (for example local residents) and public

stakeholders (for example, local ofﬁcials, leaders or

politicians, decision makers), via a click.

In this section we show the taxonomy that we cre-

ated on basis of the services offered by MPU apps

from users perspective. We adopted the taxonomy

development method of Nickerson et al. (Nickerson

et al., 2013). This method is iterative and consists in 7

steps. In the ﬁrst step, a meta-characteristic needs to

be determined. Meta-characteristic represent the per-

spective of classiﬁcation which guides choosing the

application characteristics in the taxonomy. We deter-

mine as meta-characteristic ”Services offered by Mo-

bile Public Utility applications from users perspec-

tives”. We assumed that users of the taxonomy are

citizens, public administrations, certiﬁed authority.

In the second step one has to determine ending con-

ditions. We assume that to reach ending condition

our taxonomy must be concise, robust, comprehen-

sive, extendible and explanatory. From the third step

to seventh step the process is iterative. The seventh

step checks if the ending conditions are reached. In

Figure 1 we show the created taxonomy as results of

the method we have just mentioned, totally we did

four iterations. According to the method, each step

can start chosing between two different approach:

Empirical-to-conceptual or Conceptual-to-empirical.

Usually, one chooses ”Empirical-to-conceptual” ap-

proach if there are enough available data. Instead,

”Conceptual-to-empirical” approach would be more

appropriate if one has a few data available and have a

good knowledge of the domain of interest.

In our taxonomy, we identify the ﬁrst level

as macro-dimensions, the second level as sub-

dimensions. Each sub-dimension has different char-

acteristics mutually exclusive and collectively ex-

haustive. In this paper, each sub-dimension with its

characteristics is deduced from the features of the

mentioned mobile app (Mannaro and Ortu, 2016). We

think that an application, to be considered as MPU

type, must have at least the ﬁrst macro-dimension

level in terms of services. For that reasons we decide

to describe only the ﬁrst level of the proposed taxon-

omy. However, we believe that the sub-dimensions in

Fig.1 could be used as starting point to design mobile

applications providing similar services.

• Security & Emergency-System service.

To obtain important information the MPU app

must be supported by a complex management sys-

tem designed to perform massive calculation or

evaluation. The system behavior is designed in

order to prevent a disaster, or monitor a particular

critical situation in progress. In most of the cases,

Public Administrations have already this type of

platform to manage or monitor emergencies. We

assume that MPU app interfaces with this type of

systems, to obtain proper information. The inter-

action between monitoring system and application

is managed by public administrations.

• Civic Engagement service.

By using a MPU app, users can send reports (i.e

text message, photos, videos) to signal a problem

or to suggest a danger situation. If the user is a

professional public operators, he can use MPU ap-

plication to send measures taken with a valid in-

strument to Public Administrations.

• Information.

This service manage several data type from differ-

ent sources. Public sectors choose and ﬁlter the

information in order to share and make them pub-

lic. Information can concern for example citizens

report, certiﬁed measure and all data coming from

monitoring system platform.

• Community.

That level represents the application usage ori-

ented to collective interest, with well deﬁned

roles, and where each user actively contributes.

This service allows citizens to communicate each

others to express their opinions, or their discon-

tent, about certain issues. Moreover, public ad-

ministrations can feel citizens mood about partic-

ular situations or demand their opinion with dif-

ferent surveys. Inhabitants voice is important to

make difﬁcult decisions and to avoid unpleasant

unrest.

• Navigation.

It represents the common service of navigation

that works with GPS service. When the user starts

the application, it locates his position and shows

points of interest containing information in the

same area.

4.1 MPU: TYPOLOGY OF THE

ACCESSES

MPU application enables different types of users that

should have speciﬁc access levels, there are different

permission to interact with the application by using

different access interfaces, it enables different types

of users, who should have speciﬁc access levels. We

show in Table 1 a speciﬁc example applied to Onde

Chiare app, we considered as mentioned before as an

MPU application. In that case some services are man-

aged only by the public administrations such as re-

ports validation, choice of data sharing or interaction

with the monitoring platform. To simplify, we indi-

cate two different permissions: PA/CA (Public Ad-

ministration/ Certiﬁed Authority) and Public. Starting

from the previous taxonomy and considering the dif-

ferent dimensions, each sub-dimension may have sev-

eral type of access. Table 1 shows the type of access

for each sub-dimension. We indicate with ”PA/CA”

the services reserved only to Public Administration

or Certiﬁed Authority, and with ”Public” the access

for a generic user (citizen or PA). Some services de-

scribed in the created taxonomy are managed only by

the Public Administrations such as reports validation,

choice of data sharing or interaction with the monitor-

ing platform.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper we proposed a taxonomy that classiﬁes

the services offered by a novel type of mobile ap-

plication. This taxonomy should not be considered

as deﬁnitive but a starting point towards a more ex-

haustive categorization of the dimensions of a speciﬁc

kind of mobile application for public utility that aims

to reduce risk perception on electromagnetic ﬁelds

and to ﬁll the knowledge gap between the public and

the experts about the effects of exposure to electro-

magnetic ﬁelds on human health.

Finally, we are contributing to both the academic

discussion and the practical world by providing a

Figure 1: MPU services Taxonomy at the end of fourth iteration.

Table 1: Typology of access.

Services PA/CA Public

Security & Emergency System

Environment Monitoring X

Service Alert X

Civic Engagement

Send a report X

Send a certiﬁed measure X

Information

View/Approved report X

Information Retrieval X

Critical Information X

Community

Pool X

Notice X

Forum X

Navigation

Map View X

Way Finding X

framework for other researchers and managers, be-

cause we show that using the proposed taxonomy may

facilitate designers to identify requirements and to ﬁll

gaps.

Mobile apps for public utility present many chal-

lenges for developers that must be addressed in order

to produce a successful mobile application, because

at the moment there is insufﬁcient information on ex-

actly what types of appropriate contents are capable

of enhancing the collaboration between citizens and

public governments about such delicate issues as en-

vironmental ones.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported in part by grants from the

Regione Autonoma Sardegna, Project Onde Chiare,

CUP E68C1400020007.

REFERENCES

Cocco, L., Mannaro, K., Concas, G., and Marchesi, M.

(2014). Simulation of the best ranking algorithms for

an app store. In International Conference on Mo-

bile Web and Information Systems, pages 233–247.

Springer.

Cousin, M.-E. and Siegrist, M. (2010). The public’s knowl-

edge of mobile communication and its inﬂuence on

base station siting preferences. Health, risk & society,

12(3):231–250.

Dombroviak, K. M. and Ramnath, R. (2007). A taxonomy

of mobile and pervasive applications. In Proceedings

of the 2007 ACM symposium on Applied computing,

pages 1609–1615. ACM.

Ernsting, C., Dombrowski, S. U., Oedekoven, M., LO, J.,

et al. (2017). Using smartphones and health apps to

change and manage health behaviors: A population-

based survey. Journal of medical Internet research,

19(4).

Heinonen, K. and Pura, M. (2006). Classifying mobile ser-

vices. Helsinki Mobility Roundtable, pages 1–2.

Kennedy-Eden, H. and Gretzel, U. (2012). A taxonomy of

mobile applications in tourism.

Mannaro, K. and Ortu, M. (2016). Onde chiare: A mo-

bile application to mitigate the risk perception from

electromagnetic ﬁelds. In International Conference

on Mobile Web and Information Systems, pages 31–

42. Springer.

Nickerson, R., Muntermann, J., Varshney, U., and Isaac,

H. (2009). Taxonomy development in information

systems: Developing a taxonomy of mobile applica-

tions. In European Conference in Information Sys-

tems, pages xxx–xxx.

Nickerson, R. C., Varshney, U., and Muntermann, J. (2013).

A method for taxonomy development and its applica-

tion in information systems. European Journal of In-

formation Systems, 22(3):336–359.

Organization, W. H. et al. (2002). Establishing a dialogue

on risks from electromagnetic ﬁelds. Geneva: World

Health Organization.

Riggs, W. and Gordon, K. (2017). How is mobile technol-

ogy changing city planning? developing a taxonomy

for the future. Environment and Planning B: Urban

Analytics and City Science, 44(1):100–119.

SCENIHR (2015). Opinion on potential health ef-

fects of exposure to electromagnetic ﬁelds (EMF).

http://doi.org/10.2772/75635, 2015.

Shroff, R. H., Keyes, C., and Linger, W. (2015). A proposed

taxonomy of theoretical and pedagogical perspectives

of mobile applications to support ubiquitous learn-

ing. Ubiquitous Learning: An International Journal,

8(4):23.

Tarute, A., Nikou, S., and Gatautis, R. (2017). Mobile appli-

cation driven consumer engagement. Telematics and

Informatics, 34(4):145–156.