Vehicle defined source transmitter

A vehicle for providing crowd sourced information, comprising:

• at least one transceiver configured to communicate with a data aggregation system via one or more data communication links;
• one or more onboard sensors;
• at least one processor coupled to a memory, wherein the at least one processor is configured to:
• receive data region boundary information from the data aggregation system, wherein the data region boundary information defines boundaries of a plurality of data regions;
• retrieve position information from at least one of the one or more onboard sensors;
• determine a membership in a data group for the vehicle based on the position information and a data region of the plurality of data regions;
• determine whether a second vehicle of the data group has nominated itself as a representative vehicle for the data group;
• in response to determining that the second vehicle has not nominated itself as the representative vehicle for the data group, determine whether the vehicle is capable of providing at least one type of information;
• in response to determining that the vehicle is capable of providing the at least one type of information, broadcast a self-nomination message to other member vehicles of the data group via the transceiver, wherein the self-nomination message indicates self-selection of the vehicle as the representative vehicle for the data group for the at least one type of information, wherein the self-nomination message includes an indication of the at least one type of information and an expiration time of the self-nomination message, wherein the expiration time is calculated based on a navigation path of the vehicle and a geographical boundary of the data region included among the boundaries of the plurality of data regions;
• and
• transmit the at least one type of information for the data group from the representative vehicle to the data aggregation system via a data communication link.

A data aggregation system, comprising:

• at least one transceiver configured to communicate with a plurality of vehicles via one or more data communication links;
• a data processing system coupled to the at least one transceiver, the data processing system comprising a processor coupled to a memory that stores data provided by the vehicles;
• wherein the data processing system further comprises a data region boundary identification function configured to:
• divide one or more geographic regions into one or more data regions based on at least one of predicted weather activity and current weather activity;
• and
• transmit data region boundary information to the plurality of vehicles, wherein the data region boundary information defines boundaries of the one or more data regions;
• wherein the data aggregation system is further configured to receive, via the at least one transceiver, information regarding the one or more data regions, wherein the information is provided by one or more representative vehicles for each of the one or more data regions, wherein the one or more representative vehicles are self-nominated,
• wherein the data aggregation system is further configured to receive, via the at least one transceiver, additional information regarding a data region of the one or more data regions from a second vehicle in the data region that has a different experience that is not reported by a representative vehicle of the data region.