Making your semantic application addictive

Abstract

Since many semantic content creation methods and initiatives have been developed, a fully automatic process cannot be implemented. As a consequence, many application designers are interested in the question of how to motivate users to become a part of this endeavor, compensating the limitations of purely machine-driven content creation techniques. Methods from areas as diverse as community support, participation management, usability engineering, mechanism design, and social computing, can be applied to analyze semantically enabled applications, and design incentivized variants thereof. Building on top of these theories, we revisit fundamental design issues of semantic-content authoring technology focusing on the identification of a set of incentives that drives people to contribute, and on the ways such incentives can be translated into guidelines for technology and application designers. In order to show some best practices that designers should take into account encouraging large-scale user participation in semantic applications, we describe an experiment conducted with students of the Poznan University of Economics. Following the empirical findings and insights gained during the experimental operations, we propose some general guidelines, which provide software developers with a baseline to create semantics-based technologies and end-user applications that are not just functional, but facilitate and encourage user participation.