An Extreme Tagging System as a Game With a Purpose

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Computer Science - Software, grade: 2,3, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Informatik), language: English, abstract: This thesis proposes a way to contribute to the data generation process for the Semantic Web. It picks up the idea of Extreme Tagging Systems (ETS), which are an extension to well-known Collaborative Tagging Systems (CTS) like Delicious and Flickr, where users can associate keywords (or 'tags') with resources like websites or pictures. ETS allow for more flexibility because they let the users not only tag resources but also tags themselves and even let the users specify the relation between two tags. A concept for an ETS implementation as a game is developed. This game is primarily meant to be fun for the users, by this trying to motivate them to continue to use the system. But at the same time through the game the users do work and help to solve problems that cannot yet be automated - in this case problems of Extreme Tagging. Such games that are both fun and useful are called Games With a Purpose (GWAPs). The concept for an ETS as a GWAP is implemented as well as an ETS as a website. The work then compares both implementations in respect to user motivation (fun), efficiency and productivity. It shows that the implementation as game outperforms the website in all examined aspects. For example the evaluation reveals that a user of the website is expected to generate 33 tags during her lifetime use of the system whereas a player of the game is expected to generate 53 tags. This thesis also describes several points that could further increase the advance of the game and tries to encourage further research and work being done in this direction as it seems to be a promising approach.