Semantic technologies provide flexible and scalable solutions to master and make sense of an increasingly vast and complex data landscape. However, the development and deployment of semantic technologies continues to rely on human input. The very nature of many tasks in the semanticdatamanagement life cycle makes them knowledge intensive and requires such intervention. Indeed, the Semantic Web community has always looked into applying the latest theories, methods and tools from computersupported collaborative work, participatory design, Web 2.0, social computing, and, more recently crowdsourcing in order to find ways to engage with users and to encourage their involvement. New communities of research—be it in Web Science, Collective Intelligence, or Human Computation—are currently forming themselves. The Semantic Web research community needs to build bridges to these emergent activities in order to fulfill the vision of a robust and capable future.
The topic of using human computation to address some of the more intractable problems in semantic web research has been gaining attention recently, with a crop of papers appearing in the last 1218 months (e.g., Bernstein 2012; Demartini 2012; Noy 2013; Sarasua 2012; Simperl 2011; Aroyo 2012). However, we have not yet had a forum for an indepth discussion of the methods, approaches, analysis of which problems in analyzing or creating semantic web content are amenable to human computation, what are the gold standards and evaluation methods. This workshop is the first opportunity to bridge the diverse communities whilst giving it a focus on both humans as part of the Semantic Web as well as humans as consumers of Semantic Web data within the Collective Intelligence context.
Previous workshops at ISWC (and ESWC) have explored different aspects of capitalizing human intelligence to create, curate, and manage semantic content. Our workshop aims at providing a framework for interaction and exchange among researchers studying these specific aspects, and presenting and discussing the latest insights in human computation and crowdsourcing research and their application and use in a Semantic Web context.
Despite clear evidence of the popularity of this interdisciplinary research topic, there is currently no established venue which allows researchers to discuss an agenda for future work, define research goals, and bring isolated efforts closer together. Within this workshop, we aim to lay the foundations for a research community at the intersection of crowdsourcing and semantic technologies.
References:
Aroyo,. L, Welty, C. (2013). Crowd Truth: Harnessing disagreement in crowdsourcing a relation extraction gold standard, WebSci2013, Paris, France. 2013.
Aroyo,. L, Welty, C. (2012). Harnessing Disagreement for Event Semantics. 2nd workshop on Detection, Representation and Exploitation of Events in the Semantic Web, DeRiVE’2012, colocated with the 11th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC 2012, Boston, USA. 2012.
Aroyo, L., Welty, C. (2013). Harnessing Disagreement in Crowdsourcing a Relation Extraction Gold Standard, IBM Research Technical Report No. 203386, February, 2013. Bernstein, A. The global brain semantic web Interleaving humanmachine knowledge and computation. Workshop on What will the Semantic Web Look Like 10 Years From Now? at ISCW 2012, Boston, MA. 2012.
Demartini, G., Difallah, D. E. and CudréMauroux, P. ZenCrowd: leveraging probabilistic reasoning and crowdsourcing techniques for largescale entity linking. 21st World Wide Web Conference WWW2012, Lyon, France. 2012.
Noy, N. F., Mortensen, J., Alexander, P. and Musen, M. Mechanical Turk as an Ontology Engineer? Using Microtasks as a Component of an OntologyEngineering Workflow. Web Science 2013, Paris, France, ACM. 2013.
Sarasua, C., Simperl, E. and Noy, N. F. CrowdMAP: Crowdsourcing Ontology Alignment with Microtasks. 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Boston, MA, Springer. 2012.
Simperl, E., Norton, B. and Vrandecic, D. Crowdsourcing tasks in Linked Data management. 2nd workshop on consuming Linked Data COLD2011 colocated with the 10th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC 2011, Bonn, Germany. 2011.
CrowdSem 2013 