The COMPASS Crowdsourcing Experiment IS ON!

We've now opened up full access to our small crowdsourcing experiment: the COMPASS Map Labeler. The experiment is part of a study we are conducting within the scope of the EuropeanaConnect project. The goal is to investigate the effect of social tagging and end-user map annotation on search & retrieval in online map portals, and eventually build a 'ground truth' for the evaluation of map search engines.

In our experiment we are asking volunteers to judge the relevance of a particular text label (pre-selected automatically by our system) to a random map from a test collection (kindly provided by the US Library of Congress, and mass-tiled using our very own MagickTiler). Users can also add their own labels to the maps if they see fit.

The task is simple, quick, and it's actually fun, too! (And, by the way, also a nice way to discover some hidden gems in the LoC's map collection!) So in case you want to join - head over to our study portal right now, sign up for an account, and get started!

http://compass.cs.univie.ac.at/

There's also a second stage in our experiment. It will be about map annotation, will open very soon, and I'll cover it in one of the next posts. You can already catch a first glimpse of it here, though.

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