Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Databases and Crowdsourcing
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, althoughmany crowdsourcing workers are available, their performance varies, and some of themmay 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? In this Special Issue, we have selected five high quality papers that address some of the above challenges in crowdsourcing. They are summarised below. An Abstract Formal Basis for Digital Crowds by Marija Slavkovic, Louise A. Dennis, andMichael Fisher, explores the issue of applying formal methods, which
Distributed and Parallel Databases