Beyond Wikipedia: Crowdsourcing Structured Data |
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| Event | Interactive 2011 |
| Format | Solo |
| Organizer | Mark Greaves – Vulcan Inc |
| Description | The immense success of Wikipedia has inspired people to imagine new ways in which crowdsourcing can solve old problems. One promising direction involves leveraging established wiki techniques crowdsource raw data, in a way that supports collaboration over the structure and schema of the data as well as its values and instances. Five years ago, the open-source Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) project was started to create software to enable a new type of wiki-based environment based on these principles. The goal of the SMW project was to allow wiki contributors to author basic data elements and data types in their articles in addition to the normal text, and to support user queries over the authored data. It was a simple and extremely powerful idea, and SMW now encompasses a worldwide developer community. In this presentation, I will describe SMW and the technologies that support the successful crowdsourcing of raw data. I will show how the various data-oriented features of SMW provide a set of compelling new capabilities for wiki authors (generated information graphics and consistency checkers) and for wiki readers (faceted navigation, sophisticated queries, interactive visualizations). I will illustrate the technology with several examples of different applications which have been built using SMW. Finally, I will conclude by showing a prototype of a new type of online encyclopedia, an “analytic encyclopedia,” which extends Wikipedia into the realm of structured data. |
| Questions Answered |
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| Level | Intermediate |
| Category | User Generated Content |
| Tags | crowdsourcing, semantic web, Wikis |