The INSEMTIVES ISWC2010 Tutorial - 10 ways to make your semantic app addictive

Summary
Motivation
Program
Target audience
Pre‐requisite knowledge
Presenters
Presentations

Co-located with the 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2010)
7th November, 2010, Room 3D, Shanghai, China

Summary

Useful semantic content cannot be created fully automatically, but motivating people to become an active part of this endeavor is still an art more than a science. In this tutorial we will revisit fundamental design issues of semantic-content authoring technology in order to find out which incentives speak to people to become engaged with the Semantic Web, and to determine the ways they can be transferred into technology design.

We will present a combination of methods from areas as diverse as community support, participation management, usability engineering, and incentives theory, which can be applied to analyze semantically enabled systems and applications and design incentivized variants thereof, as well as empirically grounded best practices which should be taken into account in order to encourage large-scale user participation. We will demonstrate the utility of these methods in three case studies in the areas of enterprise knowledge management, media and entertainment, and IT ecosystems. Hiding the technicalities of knowledge engineering, semantic annotation and data integration behind captivating, entertaining games is one prominent instance of incentivized semantic content authoring technology.

Our tutorial will introduce a game design API together with a number of guidelines for realizing casual games which produce useful semantic content, and present several games based thereupon that have been developed in the European research project INSEMTIVES.

↑ top

Motivation

A pre-requisite for the uptake of semantic technologies at large is the availability of machine- understandable data. This holds equally for traditional static Web content, for dynamic resources exposed in form of Web services, and for matured ontologies modeling knowledge that is of real interest to businesses or public bodies. The technical aspects of semantic content authoring are already established in the form of ontology engineering methodologies, ontology development environments, ontology learning and automatic population techniques, tools for annotating multimedia, and editors for modeling Semantic Web Services; however, in parallel to these technological advancements, we can observe a limited involvement of (non-expert) users in semantic content authoring, which can be explained by the fact that existing tools focus on functionality and (semi-)automation, but do not consider incentive models, participatory methods, and usability issues. The same holds for semantically enabled systems and applications, which rely on a representative user base to create and maintain ontologies as well as semantic descriptions of the underlying data and processes; however, in most of the cases attracting new users and engaging existing ones to contribute remains largely unaddressed. The Semantic Web is gaining momentum. As of today it has reached an order of magnitude of tens of billions of triples, most of which being the result of the increasingly popular Linked Open Data community project supported by related open knowledge-motivated initiatives such as data.gov.

Despite these very encouraging statistics, the usage of this wealth of data in high- impact applications and services is currently not more than an exciting prospect. At the same time, it is already clear that the challenges related to purposefully exposing semantic data will require significant shares of human effort, going beyond the enthusiasm of the last and probably next years. The question of how to engage a critical mass of Internet users to ensure sustainable growth is more relevant than ever. As for ontologies, despite the fact that there are over 25 000 of them published on the Web,1 a serious and mostly under-addressed problem is the creation of ontology-based metadata by end-users, especially when it comes to non-textual content. This is also reflected by the fact that most of the RDF data available are instances of several very popular ontologies such as FOAF. Modeling ontologies, annotating content semantically, as well as the curation of data sets, including the Linked Open Data Cloud, are tasks that are inherently human-driven. As such, they require a critical mass of contributors and are resource-intensive. This is particularly evident for non-textual resources like multimedia content or for Web services: while semi-automatic and automatic approaches to annotating text or extracting ontological knowledge out of text documents are available, the annotation of multimedia content as well as Web services strongly depends on human input.

End-user authoring technology providing appropriate incentive mechanisms and stimulating sustainable user participation – as we have seen for media sharing applications, various flavors of social software, or online marketplaces – are likely to make semantic applications produce the same community effects as Web 2.0, resulting in massive generation of useful semantic data. This tutorial will introduce the methodological and empirical grounding for studying and designing incentivized semantic applications.

↑ top

Program

Date: 7th November, 2010
Place: Room 3D

Time	Part	Description	Presenter
09:00 - 09:30	Human contributions in semantic content authoring	We will first look into the overall semantic content authoring landscape, including prominent instances thereof such as ontology development, ontology alignment, ontology evaluation, annotation of text, images and Web services, and Linked Open Data management, from a procedural and technical perspective. We will study the types of human-driven contributions required to reliable execute activities as those just mentioned, and introduce a series of general rules for identifying those activities which could be subject to an incentives-oriented analysis performed according to the methods and techniques covered in the next part of the tutorial.	Elena Simperl
09:30 - 10:30	Methods and techniques to analyze and design incentivized semantic applications	This part of the tutorial will explain which methods and techniques can be applied to analyze and design incentivized semantic applications. Among these we highlight game theory, field experiments, participatory design and end-user development. In addition, we will also present analytical and empirical approaches to evaluate the success of an incentives strategy in a particular semantic application context: heuristic evaluation, guideline reviews, cognitive and pluralistic walk-throughs, interviews and questionnaires. These methods have been applied in three comprehensive case studies on enterprise knowledge management at a global telecommunication operator, media management in the entertainment sector, and IT services ecosystems at an innovative Web technology vendor.	Roberta Cuel, Markus Rohde
10.30 - 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 - 12:30	Guidelines for incentivized technology design	This part is dedicated to the presentation of best-of guidelines for incentives-minded technology design, consolidated from the lessons learned by applying the methods introduced above in the case studies and beyond. A particular group of guidelines will refer to the design of casual games for semantic content creation, identifying those types of settings which are likely to be implementable as games (depending on aspects such as task, users and contributors, domain, size and structure of the ontologies etc).	Elena Simperl, Roberta Cuel, Markus Rohde
12:30 - 13:30	Lunch break
13:30 - 14:30	Casual games for semantic content creation	After the lunch break we will continue our tutorial with the presentation of the INSEMTIVES game technology, including our game design platform and API and the OntoGame series of games.	Katharina Siorpaes
14:30 - 15:00	Hands on (Part I)	In the hands-on part of the tutorial the attendees will be able to apply what they learned during the day: we will discuss the application of incentives theory and methods to a series of typical semantic technologies applications, use the game API to modify and extend a pre-defined casual game, and try out the OntoGames games. The software needed for the hands-on will be provided for download in due time. The hands-on will heavily make use of components accessible remotely over the Internet (back-end storage, user management, etc) and does not raise any particular technical challenges (except a reliable Internet connection). We will also demonstrate three semantic applications in the areas previously mentioned, which can again be accessed over the Internet (using a Web browser).	Roberta Cuel, Markus Rohde, Germán Toro del Valle
15:00 - 15:30	Coffee break
15:30 - 17:00	Hands-on (Part II)	In the hands-on part of the tutorial the attendees will be able to apply what they learned during the day: we will discuss the application of incentives theory and methods to a series of typical semantic technologies applications, use the game API to modify and extend a pre-defined casual game, and try out the OntoGames games. The software needed for the hands-on will be provided for download in due time. The hands-on will heavily make use of components accessible remotely over the Internet (back-end storage, user management, etc) and does not raise any particular technical challenges (except a reliable Internet connection). We will also demonstrate three semantic applications in the areas previously mentioned, which can again be accessed over the Internet (using a Web browser).	Roberta Cuel, Markus Rohde, Germán Toro del Valle
17:00 - 17:30	Wrap-up and closing	To conclude we will review the main notions introduced in the tutorial, collect feedback and ideas from the participants with respect to the content of the tutorial and future directions of research and development.	Elena Simperl

↑ top

Target audience

The tutorial targets researchers and practitioners in the Semantic Web community, interested in incentives-driven technology and application design.

↑ top

Pre-requisite knowledge

Knowledge of core semantic technologies, including methods and techniques from ontology design, semantic annotation and Web 2.0 are likely to facilitate a better understanding of the problems presented. The tutorial requires no background on social and economic sciences, or game design, though knowledge on these topics is surely useful.

↑ top

Presenters

Dr. Elena Simperl

Institute AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
STI Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Email: elena.simperl @aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
Website: http://members.sti2.at/~elenas/