SCG (Scientific Community Game) Court

As described in http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/4/106563-crowdsourcing-systems-on-the-world-wide-web/fulltext there is a need to build crowdsourcing platforms that make it easy to create crowdsourcing systems. SCG Court is such a crowdsourcing platform that can be used to create a large variety of different crowdsourcing systems which are defined by a playground definition.

An SCG Court playground invites the crowd to develop a knowledge base in the given domain. The playground also invites the crowd to develop clever techniques to support the claims in the knowledge base.

We have productized SCG Court. See: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lieber/evergreen/specker/scg-home.html. The full source code is available.

Here is a summary how to define a playground for your innovation area: To define the domain in which you want to innovate, you define classes Instance, Solution and InstanceSet. Class Instance defines inputs that need to be processed and it has a method valid that defines which solutions are valid: Boolean valid(InstanceI,SolutionI). Class Instance also has a method double quality(SolutionI solution) to define the quality of a solution.

Next you reuse one or more of the 6 predefined protocols to define the refutation protocol for the playground. Or you define a new protocol using the protocol language.

To complete the playground definition you define a few constants like initialReputation as described in the User Guide.

The claims are automatically defined from the protocols you have given. All claims use the same InstanceSet given in the domain. A claim defines a complex relationship between instances in InstanceSet, their solutions found by two scholars and the quality of the claim.

To use the SCG in its current form (May 2011), it is best to download the SCG Court source code and build your playground and run your tournaments while we work on making SCG Court more user-friendly as a web application.