Participatory mashups: Using users to make data mashable

{{Summary
 * title=Participatory Mashups: Using Users to make Data Mashable
 * authors=Rob Ennals, Beth Trushkowsky
 * url=http://ennals.org/rob/archive/intel/pubs/sigmod035d-ennals.pdf
 * tags=participatory mashups, mashups, ThinkLink, MashMaker, argumentation, online argumentation
 * summary=The most interesting idea in this short paper is the notion of a "participatory mashup", a tool which "relies on users to teach it what information on the web means, and how that information is connected together." This idea is motivated by the large amount of unstructured natural language found on the web, and on the additional amount of structured data on small websites which don't attract screenscrapers or mashup programmers.

The paper describes two such participatory mashups: Think Link (now Dispute Finder) and Mash Maker.

Think Link
Think Link is a tool for marking and viewing claims on the web; using a user-generated database of claims, it highlights interesting and controversial claims. With the Firefox plugin, users mark claims, connect snippets from other web pages making related claims (including those that disagree), and vote for claims, connections, and snippets.

The authors compare it to serious games (see Luis von Ahn and L. Dabbish's Designing games with a purpose), but their users gave writing, researching, and notetaking as the primary motivations. Some users are also interested in marking up claims they disagreed with, to draw attention to the counter-arguments.

Mash Maker
Mash Maker is a browser extension which suggests improvements for web pages and displays them on its toolbar. Mash Maker applies selected improvements to the current page, and suggests improvements based on earlier users' enhancements to the same site and similarly structured sites. Users can also write widgets and show Mash Maker how to extract and understand new pages. }}
 * relevance=Describes an early stage of Intel's Mash Maker project. ThinkLink has evolved into DisputeFinder, see the 2010 papers What is Disputed on the Web? and Highlighting Disputed Claims on the Web.
 * pub_date=2008
 * subject=Computer Science
 * pub_open_access=