What is Human Computation

Web 2.0 is shifting work to online, virtual environments. At the same time social networking technologies are accelerating the discovery of experts, increasing the effectiveness of online knowledge acquisition and collaborative efforts. Nowadays it is possible to harness potentially unknown (large) groups of networked specialists for their abilities to amass large-scale collections of data and to solve complex business and technical problems, in the process known as crowdsourcing. Large global enterprises and entrepreneurs are increasingly adopting crowdsourcing because of its promise to give simple, low cost, access to a scalable workforce online. Enterprise crowdsourcing examples abound, taking many different shapes and forms, from mass data collection to enabling end-user driven customer support. This chapter identifies requirements for common protocols and reusable service components, extracting from existing crowdsourcing applications, in order to enable standardized interfaces supporting crowdsourcing capabilities.