Pattern-Based Specification of Crowdsourcing Applications

In many crowd-based applications, the interaction with performers is decomposed in several tasks that, collectively, produce the desired results. Tasks interactions give rise to arbitrarily complex workflows. In this paper we propose methods and tools for designing crowd-based workflows as interacting tasks. We describe the modelling concepts that are useful in such framework, including typical workflow patterns, whose function is to decompose a cognitively complex task into simple interacting tasks so that the complex task is co-operatively solved. We then discuss how workflows and patterns are managed by CrowdSearcher, a system for designing, deploying and monitoring applications on top of crowd-based systems, including social networks and crowdsourcing platforms. Tasks performed by humans consist of simple operations which apply to homogeneous objects; the complexity of aggregating and interpreting task results is embodied within the framework. We show our approach at work on a validation scenario and we report quantitative findings, which highlight the effect of workflow design on the final results