Oassis: Query Driven Crowd Mining

Crowd data sourcing is increasingly used to gather information from the crowd and to obtain recommendations. In this paper, we explore a novel approach that broadens crowd data sourcing by enabling users to pose general questions, to mine the crowd for potentially relevant data, and to receive concise, relevant answers that represent frequent, significant data patterns. Our approach is based on (1) a simple generic model that captures both ontological knowledge as well as the individual history or habits of crowd members from which frequent patterns are mined; (2) a query language in which users can declaratively specify their information needs and the data patterns of interest; (3) an efficient query evaluation algorithm, which enables mining semantically concise answers while minimizing the number of questions posed to the crowd; and (4) an implementation of these ideas that mines the crowd through an interactive user interface. Experimental results with both real-life crowd and synthetic data demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach.