Posts Tagged ‘Labs’

playence is a member of the user advisory board of the European research project “INSEMTIVES – Incentives for Semantics“. The objective of INSEMTIVES is to bridge the gap bet­ween human and computational intell­igence in the current semantic content authoring R&D land­scape. This means the project analyses tasks in semantic content creation, i.e. mostly building ontologies and semantic annotation, and investigates and defines incentive models around them. The motivation for the project is that at many ends annotation requires some form of human input but at the same time a human user needs to be motivated somehow to invest time. Web 2.0 makes an impressive demonstration of well-defined incentive models: Flickr, del.icio.us, and Wikipedia are only three examples for Web 2.0 success stories with clear incentives, such as reputation, reciprocity through later re-use, sharing, belonging to a community, etc. Thereby, INSEMTIVES also puts a focus on games with a purpose, i.e. hiding the abstract flavor of ontology building or annotation behind games – just like playence Crowd.

The first user advisory board meeting only took place recently and the project presented a first version of their tools to get feedback. The issues discussed centered around usability, difficulty of use, and – of course – incentives. Naturally, it is difficult if not impossible to define incentives for all possible scenarios of ontology building and semantic annotation. However, from the case studies the researchers are now deriving some general rules how to make semantic applications addictive and involve their users by means of participatory design. Latest version of tools is available at http://insemtives.org/tools.html.

Incentives and usability are also core issues for playence: the connex to playence Crowd is obvious but also in playence Media are playing with different means to make adding multimedia annotations workflow-integrated, easy and somehow appealing. “What are my incentives?” in semantic content creation really is a million dollar question.