SpotTheLink: a game for ontology alignment

Abstract

The interoperability of data depends on the availability of alignments among different ontologies. Various approaches to match, merge and integrate ontologies and, more recently, to interlink RDF data sets were developed over. Even though the research area has matured, the full automation of the ontology alignment process is not feasible and the human user is indispensable. Such tasks involve mainly bootstrapping the underlying methods and for validating and enhancing their results. The question of acquiring such input still remains to be solved, in particular when it comes to the motivators and incentives that are likely to make people dedicate labor to ontology alignment tasks. In this paper we build on previous work of ours on using casual games to tackle this problem. We present SpotTheLink, the latest release of the OntoGame framework, which allows for the definition of mappings between Semantic Web ontologies as part of a collaborative game experience. We illustrate the idea of SpotTheLink in an instance of the game aiming to align DBpedia and PROTON, and explain the game background mechanics by which players' inputs are translated into SKOS-based ontology mappings. A summary of findings of SpotTheLink user evaluation and the experiences we gained throughout the entire life span of OntoGame allow us to derive a number of best practices and guidelines for the design of incentives-minded semantic-content-authoring technology, in which human and computational intelligence are smoothly interwoven.