SpotTheLink: playful alignment of ontologies

A large share of tasks in semantic-content authoring crucially rely on human intelligence [4]. This holds for many aspects of ontology engineering, but also for ontology-based annotation, be that for data-oriented resources, such as images, audio and video content, or for functionality, such as Web services and APIs. In previous work of ours we have extensively discussed the importance of motivators and incentive mechanisms to encourage a critical mass of Internet users - in particular, users beyond the boundaries of the semantic-technologies community - to contribute to such inherently human-driven tasks. Through OntoGame we have provided a framework for casual games which capitalizes on fun and competition as two key motivators for people to willingly invest their valuable time and effort in semantic-technologies-related tasks, whose technical details hide behind an entertaining collaboratively game experience [2]. This paper presents the newest release of the OntoGame series, called SpotTheLink, which addresses this challenge in the area of ontology alignment.