Games with a Purpose for the Semantic Web

Weaving the Semantic Web requires that humans contribute their labor and judgment for extending and updating formal knowledge structures. Key tasks in evolving the current Web to a Semantic Web include discovering and specifying semantic relationships between multiple ontologies and annotating textual or multimedia information. However, whereas the Web 2.0 movement is fueled by an unprecedented number of contributions from Web users, there's a substantial lack of user involvement in weaving the heavyweight Semantic Web. One cause of this lack of involvement is a lack of proper incentive structures. Hiding the tasks involved in weaving the Semantic Web behind online multiplayer games presents the tasks as fun and intellectually challenging entertainment. A series of OntoGame prototypes support the full life cycle of realizing the Semantic Web. These games adopt Luis von Ahn's "games with a purpose" concept—that is, presenting a task as an online game can motivate many people to work on this task, and for free. Preliminary results suggest that users are willing to spend substantial time playing the OntoGames. In addition, a setting in which users must propose a solution to a conceptual-modeling task such that it will most likely be consensual with an unknown game partner produces high-quality semantic data.