Introduction - Semantic Acquisition Games: Harnessing Manpower for Creating Semantics - page 1

Chapter 1
Introduction
Abstract With the ever-lasting need for semantics and metadata to describe the
resources (not only) on the Web, the focus is brought to the human-centered
approaches to semantics acquisition. Within them, inherent to the crowdsourcing, a
specific group of approaches, the semantics acquisition games (SAGs) have emerged
in the last decade. The SAGs deserve the researchers' attention, as they provide cheap
means of motivation of human workers to perform semantics acquisition jobs. The
goals of our work, outlined in this chapter, are oriented towards creation of new SAG-
based approaches and contributing with reusable SAG design principles. The topic
also aims to provide a comprehensive review of the field of semantics acquisition
games and their design principles.
Nowadays, the amount of information on the Web grows fast [ 11 ]. In order to be
able to search theWeb and utilize its content, we requiremeta-information about indi-
vidual resources (the resource metadata), especially describing the semantic meaning
of resource contents (the resource semantics). In opposite to the heterogeneity of web
resources (e.g., texts, web pages, multimedia, applications), metadata must be homo-
geneous in order to be easily processed by machines. Due to the scale and growing
speed of the Web, the approaches for the metadata acquisition must be scalable (to
cover the large space of resources) and precise (to provide quality metadata that
would not mislead their users).
The Semantic Web was envisioned as a future form of Web, which (in addition
to human-readable resources) would offer a machine readable representation of the
information and knowledge contained within its resources. The Semantic Web can
be seen as a meta-layer of the “common” Web: a collection of web resource descrip-
tion unified under universal and widely accepted domain models using the unified
representation (the Semantic Web is split in two main parts: the core semantics (or
domain models ) usually represented as ontologies and resource descriptions kept as
parts of the resources themselves (e.g. HTML meta-tags) or in separate repositories).
The provisions of such corpora would be tremendous. Apart from solving complex
queries [ 11 , 18 ], it would be much more easier to solve the problem of (web) infor-
mation space invisibility [ 9 ], which describes the situations, where users are unable