Motivation mechanisms for participation in human-driven semantic content creation

In the last few years, semantic technologies are continuously maturing and many applications are adopted in various field. To take a step towards overcoming the knowledge acquisition bottleneck, the challenge of generating semantic content persists. It usually requires the involvement of humans, thus motivations and incentives mechanisms that might foster human participation in the semantic content creation should be analyzed. We review motivation structures of different successful communities (online communities, social Web communities, open source software communities), analyze motivation mechanisms for incentivizing semantic content creation, and provide some useful insights for the design of semantic annotation tools which would embed incentives mechanisms. Keywords: Motivations, incentives, semantic content creation, ontology, annotation, participatory design, game theory. Biographical notes: Roberta Cuel holds a Ph.D. in Organization and Management (University of Udine) and is currently Assistant Professor of Organization Studies at the Faculty of Economics, University of Trento. Her research interests are aimed at discovering the interdependencies between technology and organizations, such as the impacts of innovative technologies on teams, communities, and organizational models, the study of Roberta Cuel, Olga Morozova, Markus Rohde, Elena Simperl, Katharina Siorpaes, Oksana Tokarchuk, Torben Wiedenhöfer, Fahri Yetim, and Marco Zamarian distributed tools and processes that allow organizational learning and knowledge management, and knowledge representation systems (such as ontologies, classifications, taxonomies) as mechanisms for knowledge reification processes. She has written a number of chapters in books, articles in international journals, and has served as the PC member for various interdisciplinary conferences. For further information, please see http://www.disa.unitn.it/net-­‐economy/cuel/. Olga Morozova works as a PHD researcher at the Semantic Technology Institute (STI) Innsbruck at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She received her M.S. in Computational Linguistics (Centre for Information and Language Processing) at the Ludwig-­‐Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, and a Diploma in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the Moscow State University of Lomonossov, Russia. She is working currently on the INSEMTIVES project. Markus Rohde studied psychology and sociology at the University of Bonn. He got his Ph.D. degree in Information Systems from Roskilde University, Denmark. He is working as project manager for the International Institute for Socio-­‐Informatics (IISI), Bonn and as research manager for community informatics at the Institute for Information Systems and New Media at the University of Siegen. Moreover he is editor of the political science journal "Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen" (New Social Movements). From 1997 until 2001 he worked as CEO of AGENDA CONSULT GmbH and as a consultant for medium-­‐sized enterprises and for nonprofit-­‐organizations. His main research interests are community computing, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), human-­‐ computer interaction, virtual organizations, non-­‐governmental organizations and (new) social movements. Elena Simperl works as a senior researcher at the Semantic Technology Institute (STI) Innsbruck at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Free University of Berlin and a Diploma in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich. She held positions as a research assistant at the Technical University of Munich (2002-­‐2003) and the Free University of Berlin (2003-­‐ 2007) before joining STI Innsbruck early 2007. Elena contributed to several European and national projects in the field of semantic technologies. She was scientific coordinator of the TripCom project, and project manager of the NoE Knowledge Web; currently she is acting as coordinator of the projects Service Web 3.0 and INSEMTIVES, and as activity leader in the project SOA4All. Starting from January, 2010 Elena joined the Institute AIFB. Katharina Siorpaes is currently working as a researcher at the Semantic Technology Institute (STI) Innsbruck at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is also a co-­‐founder and Chief Scientific Officer at the institute's spin-­‐off playence. Katharina holds a PhD in Survey on Potential Motivation Mechanisms for Participation in Human-driven Semantic Content Creation computer science from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her research focuses on the area of knowledge engineering. The fields include ontology engineering, collaborative ontology engineering, using games for the generation of semantic content, and incentives for semantic applications. Katharina is co-­‐organizer of the INSEMTIVES and WEBCENTIVES workshops on incentives for the (Semantic) Web at the International Semantic Web Conference and the World Wide Web conference. Oksana Tokarchuk holds a PhD in Economics and Management from University of Trento and is currently a post-­‐doc researcher at University of Trento. Her current research interests include the study of incentives with methods provided by game theory and experimental economics, the study of the effect of task representation on individual choice, linear bias and anomalies of intertemporal choice, experimental economics methods and simulations. Torben Wiedenhöfer holds a diploma in management of information systems. As a research associate at the Institute for Information Systems, University of Siegen (Germany), he is involved in several industry and research projects. In the field of user-­‐ centered software engineering, his research work focuses on the design of methodologies, processes and tools for the development of social-­‐embedded software systems, especially of Information and Collaboration Systems. His research topics are in the field of End-­‐User Development, Usability-­‐ and Requirements-­‐Engineering and Appropriation-­‐Support. The results of his work will contribute to his dissertation. Together with a colleague he founded a spin-­‐off company for knowledge-­‐management systems. Fahri Yetim is currently a Senior Researcher at the University of Siegen. He received his B.S. in Computer Science, M.S. in Information Science, and Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Constance, Germany. He was DAAD docent at the Marmara University Istanbul, German Department of Information Systems (1997-­‐2000), Visiting Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA (2001-­‐2004), and Deputy Professor at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences (2006 – 2007). His research interests include Human-­‐Computer Interaction, Value Sensitive Design, Personalization, User Participation, Discourse-­‐Support Systems and Cultural Aspects of Information Systems. Marco Zamarian is an Associate Professor of Organization Theory and Behavior and Human Resource Management at the Faculty of Economics, University of Trento. His current research interests include organizational learning, knowledge creation and replication in geographically distributed contexts, the impact of IT-­‐artifacts on organizational knowledge, industrial clusters, and the evaluation of the effects of public subsidies to the private sector, in particular for technology acquisition and R&D activities. Roberta Cuel, Olga Morozova, Markus Rohde, Elena Simperl, Katharina Siorpaes, Oksana Tokarchuk, Torben Wiedenhöfer, Fahri Yetim, and Marco Zamarian