Co-located with the International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS 2012)
June 13-15, 2012, Craiova, Romania
Summary
The Semantic Web is gaining momentum. On one side, 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.
On the other side, 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.
Despite these advancements, modeling ontologies, annotating content semantically, as well as the creation and management 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 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 services strongly depends on human perception and input.
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 on 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. 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, and also by Web developers with any background in semantic technologies.
Motivation
The question of how to engage a critical mass of Internet users, who are not familiar with semantic technologies, to actively participate and ensure sustainable growth is more relevant than ever.
As we have seen in many instances of social software, these mechanisms are likely to enable semantic applications produce the same network effects as many Web 2.0 applications have produced. In order to benefits from network effects, end-user semantic content authoring technology needs to offer an appropriate set of incentives in order to stimulate and reward users participation, generating in massive production of useful semantic content.
This tutorial will introduce the methodological and empirical grounding for studying and designing such incentives-compatible applications.
Program
- Welcome and tutors presentation (15 minutes)
- Introduction on human contributions in semantic content authoring (45 minutes)
- Users’ motivations, incentives and Web-based applications: methods and techniques to analyze and design incentivized semantic applications (60 minutes)
- Demo and experimental results on the “Taste it! Try it!” case study. The goal of the tool is to enable users to add semantically annotated reviews on services provided by restaurants, bars, and other points of interest and to share these reviews within their social network (45 minutes)
- Conclusion and open discussion (15 minutes)
Target audience
The tutorial targets researchers and practitioners in the Semantic Web community, interested in incentives-driven technology and application design.
Learning outcomes
The tutorial is aimed at providing useful insights to both researchers and practitioners developing and using semantic technologies in a Social Web context. More precisely, the tutorial will present empirically motivated guidelines and best practices which can be used to design tools and applications in an incentives-compatible manner.
From a theoretical perspective, the tutorial will introduce an innovative model which is based on motivation theories underpinned in social and economic sciences, and together with specific parameters of this model that should be taken into account in designing incentives-driven applications.
A demo will show both the model and the best practices we used and unveiled to design incentives and to embed them into the technology.
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. Roberta Cuel
Department of Computer and Management Studies, Faculty of Economics, University of Trento, Italy
Email: roberta.cuel @economia.unitn.it
Website: http://fandango.cs.unitn.it/~rcuel/
Dr. Monika Kaczmarek
Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Electronic Commerce and Informatics, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
Email: m.kaczmarek @kie.ue.poznan.pl
Dr. Elena Simperl
Institute AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Email: elena.simperl @kit.edu
Website: http://www.aifb.kit.edu/web/Elena_Simperl/
