Crowdsourcing knowledge-intensive tasks in cultural heritage

Large datasets such as Cultural Heritage collections require detailed annotations when digitised and made available online. Annotating different aspects of such collections requires a variety of knowledge and expertise which is not always possessed by the collection curators. Artwork annotation is an example of a knowledge intensive image annotation task, i.e. a task that demands annotators to have domain-specific knowledge in order to be successfully completed. This paper describes the results of a study aimed at investigating the applicability of crowdsourcing techniques to knowledge intensive image annotation tasks. We observed a clear relationship between the annotation difficulty of an image, in terms of number of items to identify and annotate, and the performance of the recruited workers.