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1. Introduction
According to Noise in Europe, "the excessive noise seriously harms human health and interferes with people's daily activities at school, at work, at home and during leisure time. It can disturb sleep, cause cardiovascular and psychophysiological effects, reduce performance and provoke annoyance responses and changes in social behaviour".
In this context, the reduction of noise is of major importance. As a first step, before reducing noise, one must be in a position to carry out an evaluation of noise in the environment, to establish, in a second time, action plans for reducting noise. For example, in Europe, the EU Directive 2002/49/EC is proposed for the assessment and management of environmental noise, firstly to identify noise pollution levels and, secondly to propose noise management action plans. This evaluation, and latter, the noise management action plans, are currently carried out by using noise maps, resulting from numerical calculations and models, which have a number of limitations that limit the accuracy and the representativity of current noise maps. Instead, one can also use measurements for producing noise maps, but it requires to use many noise sensors in order to obtain a relevant spatial accuracy.
With the development of the concept of participatory measurement, and considering the extremely large number of people equipped with a smartphone while being "in mobility", the use of smartphones is potentially relevant a solution to realize noise maps. Indeed, in 2015, more than 7 billion people (i.e. 96,4% of the world’s population) owns a mobile phone subscription. These communication devices benefit from the technology advances in consumer electronics, and integrate an increasing number of sensors, including for the latest versions position sensors (GPS), motion sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope) and environmental sensors (microphone, camera, temperature sensor, photometer, barometer). In addition, the significantly growing computational power of smartphones and their Internet connectivity increase their attractiveness at once for the public, the public authorities and business.
Several applications were recently developed for the purpose of noise levels measurements (NoiseTube, WideNoise, NoiseSpy, NoizCrowd, Noise-Watch, SoundOfTheCity, Ambicity, etc. However, some scientific and technological bottlenecks have be pointed out:
- mobile phones agents would mainly measure their daily sound exposure while the Directive 2002/49/EC fixed at least two indicators that are much less covered,
- lack of proper validation both for sound measurements and GPS location,
- components of these applications does not rely sufficiently on standards, particularly those of the GIS community.
Due to the 'limitations' of previous applications (and corresponding infrastructures), a new system was proposed, called OnoM@p. OnoM@p is a Spatial Data Infrastructure dedicated to noise monitoring based on volunteers measurements and relies on the NoiseCapture Android App.
The OnoM@p system comply with the OGC 1 and INSPIRE 2 standards, is based on Free and Open Source Softwares and, thus, be freely available for people, start-up, companies... who would develop specific applications for their own uses.
OnoM@p is strongly focused on environmental monitoring and consistent with the European Environmental Noise directive 2002/49/EC3, whose goal is to “define a common approach intended to avoid, prevent or reduce on a prioritized basis the harmful effects, including annoyance, due to the exposure to environmental noise”.