Crowdsourcing Complex Task Automatically by Workflow Technology

Micro-task Crowdsourcing market has become a new trend that convenes a large population of workers to solve the task proposed by a requester online. But these micro-tasks in the market are always simple and independent. To solve complex tasks in real world, some recursive decomposition approaches were proposed and some tools were developed. However, the process of solving complex tasks still involve lots of manual work. How to make this process more automatic? In this paper, we present a new crowdsourcing process model which includes a state machine model of a task and a relation model of tasks. Based on this process model, we design a crowdsourcing platform with the help of state machine workflow technology. With the support of this platform, we can define and execute a crowdsourcing process. In the process of the execution, the platform can manage dependencies between tasks. By means of this platform, one can develop many kinds of crowdsourcing applications with less programming, higher speed and quality. At the end of this paper, a case study is given to demonstrate the practicability of our model and platform.

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