Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Databases and Crowdsourcing

Excerpt

Crowdsourcing, which employs human workers to perform tasks on the Internet, has garnered a lot of attention. This is because crowdsourcing helps solving many problems that are considered difficult for computers, including entity resolution, question answering, image tagging, and content rating. The goal of this Special Issue is to study the issues of harnessing the power of crowdsourcing. To achieve this goal, several technical challenges need to be encountered. First, how should crowdsourcing tasks be designed? Second, in some crowdsourcing systems (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk), rewards, or incentives, can be given to workers when their tasks have been completed successfully. How should these incentives be allocated to tasks? Third, are existing crowdsourcing user interface designed well (e.g., on mobile platforms)? Fourth, although many crowdsourcing workers are available, their performance varies, and some of them may not be very reliable. Is it possible to understand their behaviour in a more systematic manner, so that the best workers can be chosen for a given task? …