Crowdsourcing Game - Manual Annotation

Question

[Yannick Wurm]

We're getting more and more genomes & automated gene annotation remains problematic: looking at specific gene families still requires tedious manual annotation. Crowdsourcing (as discussed in [1]) may offer an opportunity... but gene annotation crowdsourcing efforts don't seem to be aimed at a broad audience (contributors are probably students or collaborators who don't have much choice)

It would be wonderful if biologically useful crowdsourcing efforts were combined into reputation games - people could "do good" by contributing to a crowdsourced annotation effort in the form of a facebook application.... and earn reputation points to show off to their friends how charitable they are with their time.

If anything like that is in the works, please share!

[Yannick Wurm]

This is actually happening! Get in touch if you want to be involved. Cheers - yannick

Answer 1

[Niallhaslam]

There is a new implementation of the Distributed Annotation Server that facilitates writeback.

http://code.google.com/p/writeback/

A full manuscript is available here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/12/143

In fact they call their system a Collaborative Annotation System. Sounds pretty much like what you are looking for!

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

@niallhaslam it looks cool, but does this server manages the users reputation, as Yannick asked ?

[Niallhaslam]

@Pierre not sure. However, one would assume this would become part of the project. The DAS spec is currently adding more detailed authenication methods, so perhaps they are waiting on that.

However, the original question just asks about collaboration and reputation seems to be an added extra from my reading of the question.