Inproceedings,
OntoGame: Weaving the Semantic Web by Online Gaming
Proceedings of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer Verlag, (June 2008)
Abstract
Most of the challenges faced when building the Semantic Web require a substantial amount of human labor and intelligence. Despite significant advancement in ontology learning and human language technology, building ontologies, annotating data, and establishing alignments between multiple ontologies remain tasks that highly depend on human intelligence, both as a source of domain expertise and for specifying the results. This means that individuals need to contribute time, and sometimes other resources. Now, we can observe a sharp contrast in user interest in two branches of Web activity: While the “Web 2.0” movement lives from an unprecedented amount of contributions from Web users, we witness a substantial lack of user involvement in the aforementioned tasks . We assume that one cause of the latter is a lack of proper incentive structures, i.e., settings in which the perceived benefits outweigh the efforts for people to contribute. As a novel solution, we (1) propose to masquerade the core tasks of weaving the Semantic Web behind on-line, multi-player game scenarios, in order to create proper incentives for humans to get involved. Doing so, we adopt the findings from the already famous “games with a purpose” by von Ahn, who has shown that presenting a useful task, which requires human intelligence, in the form of an on-line game can motivate a large amount of people to work heavily on this task, and this for free. Then, we (2) describe our OntoGame prototypes, (3) provide preliminary evidence that users are willing to invest a lot of time into those games, (4) show that the users’ input creates reliable results, and (5) discuss how, by doing so, they unknowingly weave the Semantic Web.
