OntoGame: Weaving the Semantic Web by Online Games - Check it out today: http://www.ontogame.org/

From: Martin Hepp (UIBK) <martin.hepp@uibk.ac.at> · Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:22:21 +0100

Dear all:

We are proud to release the first one in our series of online computer
games that turn core tasks of weaving the Semantic Web into challenging
and interesting entertainment - check it out today at

http://www.ontogame.org/ !

A very early paper written in late Summer is in Springer LNCS Vol. 4806,
2007, pp. 1222-1232 [1].

A complete Technical Report including our
quantitative evidence and video footage will be released shortly on our
project Web page at http://www.ontogame.org/

The next series of games for other tasks of building the Semantic Web is
already in the pipeline, so please stay tuned :-)

Please subscribe to our OntoGame mailing list if you want to be informed
once new gaming scenarios or results are available. See [2] for details
on how to subscribe.

What is it good for?
====================
Despite significant advancement in technology and tools, building
ontologies, annotating data, and aligning multiple ontologies remain
tasks that highly depend on human intelligence, both as a source of
domain expertise and for making conceptual choices. This means that
people need to contribute time, and sometimes other resources, to this
endeavor.
As a novel solution, we have proposed to masquerade core tasks of
weaving the Semantic Web behind on-line, multi-player game scenarios, in
order to create proper incentives for humans to contribute. 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.

Since our first experiments in May 2007, we have gained preliminary
evidence that (1) users are willing to dedicate a lot of time to those
games, (2) are able to produce high-quality conceptual choices, and, by
doing so, (3) can unknowingly weave the Semantic Web.

Acknowledgments: OntoGame is possible only thanks to the hard work of
the OntoGame team - special thanks to Michael Waltl, Werner Huber,
Andreas Klotz, Roberta Hart-Hiller, and David Peer for their dedication
and continuous contributions! The work on OntoGame has been funded in 
part by the Austrian BMVIT/FFG  under the FIT-IT Semantic Systems 
project myOntology (grant no. 812515/9284), http://www.myontology.org, 
which we gratefully acknowledge.

And now.... play and enjoy!

Best wishes

Martin Hepp and Katharina Siorpaes
-------------------------------------
Katharina Siorpaes
E-mail: katharina(dot)siorpaes(at)deri(dot)at
Web: http://members.deri.at/~katharinas

Martin Hepp
E.mail: mhepp(at)computer(dot)org
Web: http://heppnetz.de

[1] OTM paper: Siorpaes, Katharina; Hepp, Martin: OntoGame: Towards
Overcoming the Incentive Bottleneck in Ontology Building, Proceedings of
the 3rd International IFIP Workshop On Semantic Web & Web Semantics
(SWWS '07), co-located with OTM Federated Conferences, Vilamoura,
Portugal, November 29-30, 2007, in: R. Meersman, Z. Tari, P. Herrero et
al. (Eds.): OTM 2007 Workshops, Part II, Springer LNCS Vol. 4806, 2007,
pp. 1222-1232.
Authors' copy available at
http://www.heppnetz.de/files/SiorpaesHepp-OntoGame-camready.pdf

[2] Mailing list: https://lists.deri.at/mailman/listinfo/ontogame

[3] Project page: http://www.ontogame.org/