Asking the right questions in crowd data sourcing

Crowd-based data sourcing is a new and powerful data procurement paradigm that engages Web users to collectively contribute information. In this work, we target the problem of gathering data from the crowd in an economical and principled fashion. We present Ask It!, a system that allows interactive data sourcing applications to effectively determine which questions should be directed to which users for reducing the uncertainty about the collected data. Ask It! uses a set of novel algorithms for minimizing the number of probing (questions) required from the different users. We demonstrate the challenge and our solution in the context of a multiple-choice question game played by the ICDE'12 attendees, targeted to gather information on the conference's publications, authors and colleagues. © 2012 IEEE.