Co-located with the 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011)
October 23-27, 2011, Bonn, Germany
Summary
In many application scenarios useful semantic content can hardly 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 look into fundamental design issues of semantic-content authoring technology - and of the applications deploying such technology - in order to find out which incentives speak to people to become engaged with the Semantic Web, and to determine the ways these incentives can be transferred into technology design. We will present how methods and techniques from areas as diverse as participation management, usability engineering, mechanism design, social computing, and game mechanics can be jointly applied to analyze semantically enabled applications, and subsequently design incentives-compatible variants thereof. The discussion will be framed by three case studies on the topics of enterprise knowledge management, media and entertainment, and IT ecosystems, in which combinations of these methods and techniques has led to increased user participation in creating useful semantic descriptions of various types of digital resources - text documents, images, videos and Web services and APIs. Furthermore, we will revisit the best practices and guidelines that have been at the core of an earlier version of this tutorial at the previous edition of the ISWC in 2010, following the empirical findings and insights gained during the operation of the three case studies just mentioned. These guidelines provide IT developers with a baseline to create technology and end-user applications that are not just functional, but facilitate and encourage user participation that supports the further development of the Semantic Web.
Motivation
The Semantic Web is gaining momentum. As of today it has reached an order of magnitude of hundreds of billions of RDF triples, most of which being the result of the increasingly popular Linked Open Data community project, supported by related open access-motivated initiatives such as data.gov and its counterparts worldwide, and the solid theoretical and technical foundations of a decade of Semantic Web research and development. 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 past couple of years.
The technical aspects of semantic content authoring are already established in the form of methodologies, methods, techniques and software tools supporting critical aspects of content authoring life cycle: the development and maintenance of ontologies, the publication of structured data as RDF, the alignment of heterogeneous schemas and of the underlying data, as well as the semantic annotation of various types of digital resources. However, in parallel to these 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 mainly functionality and (semi-)automation, and not on incentive models, participatory methods, and usability issues. The same holds for semantically enabled 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 question of how to engage a critical mass of Internet users, who are not familiar with semantic technologies, to ensure sustainable growth is more relevant than ever. For ontologies, despite the fact that there are over 25 000 of them published on the Web, a serious and mostly under-addressed problem is the creation of ontology-based metadata by non-experts – end-users, but also traditional Web developers without a background in semantic technologies. This is most notably true for non-textual content, for which automatic approaches still require a significant share of training and human feedback. For Linked Data, the same problem can be observed in the context of interlinking and alignment, and the curation of data sets, to name only two representative examples.
End-user semantic content authoring technology tackling tasks as those just discussed – and its vertical applications - needs to offer appropriate incentives to stimulate and reward user participation. As we have seen in many instances of social software, these mechanisms are likely to make semantic applications produce the same community effects as Web 2.0, resulting in massive generation of useful semantic content. This tutorial will introduce the methodological and empirical grounding for studying and designing such incentives-compatible applications.
Program
Date: October 24, 2011 - half day
Place: Bonn, Germany, Maritim Bonn
| Time | Part | Description | Presenter | Slides |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14:00 - 14:45 | 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 computation required to reliably carry out 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 |  |
| 14:45 - 15:30 | Case study: Enterprise knowledge management at Telefónica | Describing enterprise data semantically enables the realization of enhanced IT services that boost productivity, but this advantage is predicated in the long-run by the extent to which employees are motivated to create semantic descriptions of the data as part of their daily work. The high barriers of entrance for most semantically enabled applications and tools, combined with their lack of means to make the benefits of semantic descriptions immediate and obvious to their users are just two of the most frequently cited reasons for this state of affairs. In this part of the tutorial we will share our experiences at Telefónica Research & Development to design semantic-annotation technology and incentive structures that encourage employees to create semantic descriptions of the data they consume on a daily basis, exploiting cutting-edge game mechanics ideas and social computing techniques. | Oksana Tokarchuk | |
| 15:30 - 16:00 | Coffee break | |||
| 16:00 - 16:45 | Case study: Crowdsourcing the annotation of dynamic Web content at seekda | seekda decided to involve end-users in the (re-) design process of their service annotation platform. Since seekda’s users are geographically distributed online users, an open Online Participatory Design (OPD) process was set-up and successfully executed. The case study describes the chosen OPD methodology and presents the development and implementation of the OPD dashboard as a technical infrastructure for OPD workshops involving potential end-users, and discusses the impact of (motivational) design requirements on the prototype design and the specific OPD process within seekda. In addition to strengthening their links to the user community, seekda investigated alternative user participation strategies in the area of crowdsourcing. The case study will report on their experiences on using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to annotate services semantically, and on a number of challenges they launched to increase community involvement. | Markus Rohde, Elena Simperl | |
| 16:45 - 17:30 | Case study: Content tagging at MoonZoo and MyTinyPlanets | This part of the tutorial will look at both the practical implications of taking an existing annotation project and bringing it to a younger audience as well as the interface design and motivational issues surrounding the process of semantic annotation within entertainment environments. In particular, emphasis will be placed upon aspects of design that encourage 'game-like' or 'playful' interactions with content, including game design, game balance and engaging interfaces. These may differ somewhat from more traditional form-like interfaces and introduce a new set of both problems and opportunities. | Carl Goodman | |
| 17:30 - 18:00 | Ten ways to make your semantic app addictive - revisited | 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); and to the integration of game-inspired concepts to interaction design in vertical (enterprise) applications. | Elena Simperl, Markus Rohde | |
Target audience
The tutorial targets researchers and practitioners in the Semantic Web community, interested in incentives-driven technology and application design.
Pre-requisite knowledge
Knowledge of core semantic technologies, including methods and techniques from ontology engineering, 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 though knowledge on these topics is surely useful.
Presenters
Dr. Elena Simperl
Institute AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Email: elena.simperl @kit.edu
Website: http://members.sti2.at/~elenas/
Dr. Markus Rohde
Information Systems and New Media, University of Siegen, Germany
International Institute for Socio-Informatics, Bonn, Germany
Email: markus.rohde @uni‐siegen.de
Website: http://www.uni-siegen.de/.../wmitarbeiter/rohde/
Oksana Tokarchuk
Department of Computer and Management Studies, Faculty of Economics, University of Trento, Italy
Email: oksana.tokarchuk@unitn.it
Carl Goodman
Pepper's Ghost Productions Ltd, United Kingdom
Email: carl.goodman @peppersghost.com
Website: http://www.peppersghost.com/
