Masterarbeit
Applying Gamification to Research Dataset Publishing
Research Area
Intelligent Information Management
Students
Gurami Khatiashvili
Advisers
Description
In the context of OpenScience, researchers are encouraged to also
publish their research-related files in common data repositories
so that others can find and reuse it. This publishing encompasses
the provision of additional structured meta information about certain
characteristics of these scientific datasets, as these are normally not
self-descriptive. However, especially for early-career researchers, it is
an obstacle to start with research data publishing because they are not
aware and therefore tend to not make use of relevant existing standards,
are bored to fill out extensive submission forms or see it as a
time-consuming activity without support or interaction. The Gamification of
traditional Research Dataset Management applications might be one approach,
that can improve this situation.
The objective of this thesis project is to do research on alternative
approaches to encourage scientists to provide research datasets early,
frequently and with high-qualitative, structured, correct metadata. After
describing the current situation and a motivating scenario, a requirement
analysis has be performed first. Then, a state-of-the-art analysis
concerning existing approaches has to be conducted. A concept has to be
designed and described on how to use gamification elements for research
dataset publishing to let users provide more relevant metadata and increase
their motivation to publish research datasets. It should be based on
currently web-form based submission approaches and can focus on early-career
researchers. The concept has to take into consideration both that the
user's motivation might solely focus on quickly publishing their own
scientific data files and that a set of collected research datasets which
contain well-structured qualitative meta descriptions are of high value for
such a repository system. An implementation based on an established base
application, such as CKAN, and evaluation has to show the feasibility and
acceptance of the proposed Gamification approach.
