Extending Search to Crowds: A Model-Driven Approach

  • Alessandro Bozzon
  • Marco Brambilla
  • Stefano Ceri
  • Andrea Mauri
Chapter
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 7538)

Abstract

In many settings, the human opinion provided by an expert or knowledgeable user can be more useful than factual information retrieved by a search engine. Search systems do not capture the subjective opinions and recommendations of friends, or fresh, online-provided information that require contextual or domain-specific expertise. Search results obtained from conventional search engines can be complemented by crowdsearch, an online interaction with crowds, selected among friends, experts, or people who are presently at a given location; an interplay between conventional and search-based queries can occur, so that the two search methods can support each other. In this paper, we use a model-driven approach for specifying and implementing a crowdsearch application; in particular we define two models: the “Query Task Model”, representing the meta-model of the query that is submitted to the crowd and the associated answers; and the “User Interaction Model”, showing how the user can interact with the query model to fulfil her needs. Our solution allows for a top-down design approach, from the crowd-search task design, down to the crowd answering system design. Our approach also grants automatic code generation, thus leading to quick prototyping of crowd-search applications.

Keywords

Exploratory Search Social Networking Platform Social Platform Amazon Mechanical Turk Automatic Code Generation 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  • Alessandro Bozzon
    • 1
  • Marco Brambilla
    • 1
  • Stefano Ceri
    • 1
  • Andrea Mauri
    • 1
  1. 1.Dipartimento di Elettronica e InformazionePolitecnico di MilanoItaly

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