Motivation Model in Community-Built System - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 184

discussion presented herein is related to both the community-built database systems
and other community-built systems such as a knowledge repository [ 1 , 2 ]ordigital
library [ 3 ].
The motivation model belongs to the class of incentive models and is oriented
toward maintaining control of social economic systems. Generally speaking, the
incentive model consists of elements induced from a community of actors performing
certain actions [ 4 ]. The main assumption about the incentive model is that an agent's
strategy is defined by a choice of action. The system's strategy is a choice of the
incentive function (being the control parameter) - a mapping of agents' actions onto
the set of obtainable rewards (remuneration) [ 5 ]. In the case of community-built
systems, it is impossible to have a predefined operational center. The community
members switch their roles (the editors and creators) continuously. The model can be
used to simulate various community-built information systems. In a provided case
study, an e-learning information system is analyzed.
The actors share knowledge in order to build up community knowledge by
efficient and effective collaborative authoring and communication tools that
the community-built system provides. For example, Wiki provides opportunities
for collaborative knowledge building [ 6 ] to create community knowledge [ 6 ]. The
community knowledge can be represented by a computer-friendly ontology repre-
sentation [ 7 ]. As in a knowledge-base system, the goal of community members can
be defined by expressing a member's ontology on the scale of/between commonly
shared ontologies. Hence, the main research issues are: the development of a
distributed knowledge model [ 8 ], the construction of a collaborative ontology [ 9 ],
and integration of the ontologies and its attendant issues [ 10 ]. In this chapter, the
motivation model supports a process of achieving consensus on commonly shared
ontologies [ 11 ]. In the literature, there are other collaborative systems based on the
concept of ontology, like a workflow-centric collaboration system [ 12 ], or collabo-
rative semantic tools for domain conceptualization [ 13 ]. However, none of them
supports the concept of a community-built system.
This chapter will investigate the concept of development of the motivation
model aimed at supporting the activity of users in the process of developing and
maintaining the community-built information system. The proposed motivation
model focuses on the task of filling the community-built system with high-quality
content. Furthermore, the motivation model includes interactions and collaboration
between users. Hence, the community-built system is treated as a knowledge
repository. A structure of the motivation model and formal assumptions regarding
the evaluation of the model will be described. Moreover, an example of a motiva-
tion model application will be presented as a case study.
The chapter is organized in the following manner: in the second section, a process
of networked knowledge processing is discussed in the perspective of a knowledge
network. The author believes that the emergence of a knowledge network is one of
the main reasons for the existence and development of community-built information
systems. The third section covers certain elements of the concept of community-
built system. Particular attention is paid to the processes of collaboration and
cooperation and the Wiki mechanism. In the fourth section, the motivation model