So you’re sitting in a coffee shopping talking over an idea with a friend: how to get people to contribute quality metadata on all manner of topics. Kind of a semantic wikipedia but where the goal is data entry rather than essay writing.
The basic concept is straight-forward: start from a basic fact such as “Isaac Newton is a Person”. Then, using appropriate ontologies generate additional questions: a Person has a birthdate therefore, “what is Isaac Newton’s birthdate?”(*). And so on. Generate RSS feeds containing the questions with embedded forms allowing people to answer each question. Update your database based on the answers, using a voting (or similar) model to take the most common answer from all contributors. Provide stats on who answers the most questions, answers them first, answers most questions in a particular domain, etc. You’ll then end up with a positive feedback effect that (hopefully) encourages more people to contribute.
Move forward two days and Amazon have done all the hard work: Amazon Mechanical Turk. With the spin thats its all about micropayments rather than karma, and unlike the original it doesn’t play chess.
(*) January 4, 1643 by the Gregorian Calendar.
It’s Like the Ultimate Lazy Web
Published
Lost Boy 