Purposeful Online Communities a User Generated Behavior

Purposeful Online Communities a User Generated Behavior

Since the so-called Web 2.0 has arrived, user-generated content has become an expected behavior on the Web. Commenting, rating and other types of contributions are widespread. While users are able to provide content (unlike in Web 1.0), they still can not introduce user-generated behavior. In other words, their contributions are limited to the designs of the application builders.

Social networking applications like Facebook and Twitter are often used to perform goal-oriented activities, such as disaster response, hobbies, interest groups etc. Aside from some event management and simple group communication support, these applications do not provide support for community-specific behavior. All the computation and tracking necessary to manage community activities are performed by humans who then shared the outcomes with the communities. For example, consider tracking the needs of the people that have been hit by a disaster: What do they need? How much.many? What is the current status of fulfilling this need?

Tracking this information correctly is exhausting and error­prone. Furthermore, it is unfortunate that the wonderful resources of a distributed information system (Web) do not better support their users with computational functionalities that are meaningful to them. They could, of course, if they only knew what was needed.

Human Computation1 refers to systems that synthesize human and computer computation towards a goal by utilizing the best aspects of human and computing resources. Examples are: Mechanical Turk2 are Foldit3 (a Protein Folding discovery in science). Still, these applications are developed by some and contributed to by others. We need models for communities to define their own information and processing needs.

This work concerns a model of human computation that is developed and used by a community. We refer to a goal-driven community who coordinated its work online as a purposeful online community (POC). In POC’s community members specify information and processes that are relevant to them. Specifications are used to generate community-specific applications. The following figure shows the overview: 

For this model to work, we need the information to be processable rather than just text or predefined options. Therefore, we work with processable information technologies.

In this project, we will focus on modeling and developing an application for creating POC specifications OR community POC execution (you can choose what you would like to work on). As part of this work you will work with

  1. Existing ontologies POC­Core and POC­API
  2. W3C standards, such as
    1. JSON­LD (http://json­ld.org)
    2. SIOC (https://www.w3.org/Submission/sioc­spec/)
    3. OWL 2 (https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2­primer/)
    4. HTTP1.1 protocol (https://www.w3.org/Protocols)
  3. JENA (https://jena.apache.org/) for processing ontologies
  4. UX ­­ modeling an end user specification app, this involves interacting with potential community members.

The focus will be on #4, developing community member oriented interfaces and interaction models. Thereby, enabling ordinary users to utilize the power of the web for purposes that concern them.

For more information contact: suzan.uskudarliatboun.edu.tr

Depending on the level of interest, this project is suitable for Cmpe491 and Cmpe492

Project Poster: 

Project Advisor: 

Suzan Üsküdarlı

Project Status: 

  • Fall

Contact us

Department of Computer Engineering, Boğaziçi University,
34342 Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey

  • Phone: +90 212 359 45 23/24
  • Fax: +90 212 2872461
 

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