We are proud to release the first one in our series of online computer games that turn core tasks of weaving the Semantic Web into challenging and interesting entertainment.

Check it out today at:
http://www.ontogame.org/

A very early paper written in late Summer is in Springer LNCS Vol. 4806, 2007, pp. 1222-1232 [1].

A complete Technical Report including our quantitative evidence and video footage will be released shortly on our project Web page at http://www.ontogame.org/

The next series of games for other tasks of building the Semantic Web is already in the pipeline, so please stay tuned...

Please subscribe to our OntoGame mailing list if you want to be informed
once new gaming scenarios or results are available. See [2] for details
on how to subscribe.

What is it good for?

Despite significant advancement in technology and tools, building ontologies, annotating data, and aligning multiple ontologies remain tasks that highly depend on human intelligence, both as a source of domain expertise and for making conceptual choices. This means that people need to contribute time, and sometimes other resources, to this
endeavor.

As a novel solution, we have proposed to masquerade core tasks of weaving the Semantic Web behind on-line, multi-player game scenarios, in order to create proper incentives for humans to contribute. Doing so, we adopt the findings from the already famous "games with a purpose" by von Ahn, who has shown that presenting a useful task, which requires human intelligence, in the form of an on-line game can motivate a large amount
of people to work heavily on this task, and this for free.

Since our first experiments in May 2007, we have gained preliminary evidence that (1) users are willing to dedicate a lot of time to those games, (2) are able to produce high-quality conceptual choices, and, by doing so, (3) can unknowingly weave the Semantic Web.

Acknowledgments: OntoGame is possible only thanks to the hard work of the OntoGame team - special thanks to Michael Waltl, Werner Huber, Andreas Klotz, Roberta Hart-Hiller, and David Peer for their dedication and continuous contributions! The work on OntoGame has been funded in part by the Austrian BMVIT/FFG under the FIT-IT Semantic Systems
project myOntology (grant no. 812515/9284), http://www.myontology.org, which we gratefully acknowledge.

And now.... play and enjoy!

Best wishes

Martin Hepp and Katharina Siorpaes

[1] OTM paper: Siorpaes, Katharina; Hepp, Martin: OntoGame: Towards Overcoming the Incentive Bottleneck in Ontology Building, Proceedings of the 3rd International IFIP Workshop On Semantic Web & Web Semantics (SWWS '07), co-located with OTM Federated Conferences, Vilamoura, Portugal, November 29-30, 2007, in: R. Meersman, Z. Tari, P. Herrero et al. (Eds.): OTM 2007 Workshops, Part II, Springer LNCS Vol. 4806, 2007, pp. 1222-1232. Authors' copy available at http://www.heppnetz.de/files/SiorpaesHepp-OntoGame-camready.pdf

[2] Mailing list: https://lists.deri.at/mailman/listinfo/ontogame

[3] Project page: http://www.ontogame.org/