OntoGamif: A modular ontology for integrated gamification

Abstract

Gamification is known as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts. It has gained a great interest from both industrials and academics during the last years due to its role in increasing engagement of people in several sectors including business, learning, crowdsourcing and enterprise in formation systems. However, due to its inherent multi-disciplinarity, gamification lacks an integrated view and a holistic and consensual agreement on its foundational concepts among the stakeholders. In this context we propose OntoGamif (Ontology of Gamification), a modular ontology for the gamification domain of interest covering topics concerning, for instance, target users, organizational structures, ethical issues, and psychological factors. These are organized as seven linked modular sub-ontologies that can be used also independently to support the work of gamification designers implementing personalized gamified solutions. The process used to build OntoGamif was inspired by some of the most used ontology engineering methodologies. Moreover, we discuss the multi-perspective approach in evaluating OntoGamif including experts’ validation, case study analysis, comparison to a corpus and a mapping of OntoGamif to the SUMO upper level ontology.