With the widespread use of geo-positioning services (GPS), GPS-based navigation systems have become ever more of an integral part of our daily lives. GPS-based navigation systems usually suggest multiple paths for any given pair of source and target, leaving users perplexed when trying to select the best one among them, namely the problem of best path selection. Too many suggested paths may jeopardize the usability of the recommendation data, and decrease user satisfaction. Although existing studies have already partially relieved this problem through integrating historical traffic logs or updating traffic conditions periodically, their solutions neglect the potential contribution of human experience. In this paper, we resort to crowdsourcing to ease the pain of the best path selection. The first step of appropriately using the crowd is to ask proper questions. For the best path selection problem, simple questions (e.g. binary voting) over compete paths cannot be directly applied to road networks due to their being too complex for crowd workers. Thus, this paper makes the first contribution by designing two types of questions, namely Routing Query (RQ) and Binary Routing Query (BRQ), to ask the crowd to decide which direction to take at each road intersection. Furthermore, we propose a series of efficient algorithms to dynamically manage the questions in order to reduce the selection hardness within a limited budget. Finally, we compare the proposed methods against two baselines, and the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposals are verified by the results from simulations and experiments on a real-world crowdsourcing platform.
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