![Web Based Content Management System Using
Crowdsourcing Technology
H.M.C.Chandrathilake
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
University of Moratuwa,
Sri Lanka
Chamil.11@cse.mrt.ac.lk
Abstract—This paper discusses about the Web Based Content
Management System developed associating the Crowdsourcing
Technology. Using the web application, the users get the
opportunity to find information that are not readily available in
the internet. This process is associated with the Crowdsourcing
Technology which is described in detail in the paper. An
introduction to the project, the motivation, technologies,
architectural decisions and designs used and future work are also
discussed under different sections.
I. INTRODUCTION
Despites the fact that World Wide Web has become an
ocean of information, there are several problems associated
with these information. One such problem is that the
distribution of the availability of information is not satisfactory.
While there are loads of information about some subjects of
interest, one may still find it difficult to find sufficient
information about some other subjects. The issue becomes
severe when it comes to subjects that are local to some country
or region. Another problem is that there is no guarantee for the
reliability of information that one can get from the World Wide
Web. Further, the information available in the internet may not
always be in the correct form that a person needs them to be.
These issues are often experienced by many and they are the
motivation for this project. The web application, named
‘Palama’, aims to address them to a certain extent.
II. CROWD SOURCING TECHNOLOGY
A. Introduction
Crowdsourcing is a concept that emerged in recent years. It
is more of a process of obtaining services, ideas or content by a
larger group of people, most probably from an online
community. Hence, the concept goes further than the
traditional supplier-consumer theory [1].
B. Definition
Crowdsourcing technology has been defined in multiple
ways as it appear in a wide range of activities. Two of the
popular definitions are quoted below.
The definition presented by Enrique Estellés-Arolas and
Fernando González Ladrón-de-Guevara, researchers at the
Technical University of Valencia [2]
“Crowdsourcing is a type of participative online activity in
which an individual, an institution, a non-profit organization, or
company proposes to a group of individuals of varying
knowledge, heterogeneity, and number, via a flexible open call,
the voluntary undertaking of a task. The undertaking of the
task, of variable complexity and modularity, and in which the
crowd should participate bringing their work, money,
knowledge and/or experience, always entails mutual benefit.
The user will receive the satisfaction of a given type of need,
be it economic, social recognition, self-esteem, or the
development of individual skills, while the crowdsourcer will
obtain and utilize to their advantage that which the user has
brought to the venture, whose form will depend on the type of
activity undertaken”
Definition presented by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson [3]
“Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a
company or institution taking a function once performed by
employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally
large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can
take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed
collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole
individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call
format and the large network of potential laborers”
C. The key idea used in the project
The above concept is applied in the system for content
management. The clients and service providers are all from the
community which engage with the web application. The
system provides a platform for both the parties and it also
includes a validation process and a payment process. These
will be described in detail.
III. USE CASES
To understand the basic functionality of the system, it is
important to know the parties involved in the system. These
parties have different roles. Following are the users of the
system.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/313acc9d-2bb9-4f2a-8a2e-7b2e3b696e3f-150726053525-lva1-app6892/85/Web_based_content_management_system_using_crowdsourcing_technology-1-320.jpg)
![content to him receiving the content. Following are the steps
in sequence.
A content requester submits a request for the content
he needs
A content provider views the request and submits
what the requested person asked for
The system directs the submissions to the evaluators
If the evaluation recommends the submissions to be
published, the administrators publish the content
The content provider is funded a certain amount of
money in the meantime
Once these actions are completed, the content requester and
any general reader can access the content.
E. High-level database schema
Fig. 6. Database schema of the system - Palama
The database schema diagram displays the relational
database tables that were used to store data for the system and
their relationships. Following are the purposes of each table.
Login – details about users
Request – details about the requests done by
content requesters
Content – the content submitted by the content
providers
Metacontent – meta data about the content articles
Tags – tags that are used for searching the articles
tagsLocal – tags stored in Sinhala language
image – profile pictures of the users
featured – details about featured articles that are to
be displayed in the web site
The schema is planned to be updated once the funding
process is introduced to the system.
V. FUTURE WORK
The Palama web based content management system can be
extended effectively in a way such that a wider range of
audience can benefit from it. Also, a proper financial plan can
be introduced for the funding process. Following is a
description about possible future work.
A. Extending the system to support more languages
The Palama web based content management system
currently support English and Sinhala languages only. The
word ‘support’ here indicates that the article can be requested,
submitted, searched and viewed in the mentioned two
languages. As an initial step, the web application is targeted for
Sri Lankan citizens. Therefore, the next immediate step would
be to extend the system to support Tamil language. As the next
step, it will be important to support more and more regional
languages in order to open doors for global community to
effectively use the services of the Palama web application.
B. Introducing a funding plan
One of the design decisions of the project is to include a
funding process in which the content providers are issued
payments considering their contribution and the quality of
work. The money is not to be charged from the content
requesters but to be paid through the administrator panel. This
will both encourage the content providers to contribute more
and consider more about the quality of their work.
REFERENCES
[1] Doan, Anhai, Raghu Ramakrishnan, and Alon Y. Halevy.
"Crowdsourcing systems on the world-wide web." Communications of
the ACM 54.4 (2011): 86-96.
[2] Estellés-Arolas, Enrique, and Fernando González-Ladrón-de-Guevara.
"Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition." Journal of
Information science 38.2 (2012): 189-200.
[3] Howe, Jeff. "Crowdsourcing: A Definition". Crowdsourcing Blog.
(2006).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/313acc9d-2bb9-4f2a-8a2e-7b2e3b696e3f-150726053525-lva1-app6892/85/Web_based_content_management_system_using_crowdsourcing_technology-4-320.jpg)
Web_based_content_management_system_using_crowdsourcing_technology
- 1. Web Based Content Management System Using Crowdsourcing Technology H.M.C.Chandrathilake Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka Chamil.11@cse.mrt.ac.lk Abstract—This paper discusses about the Web Based Content Management System developed associating the Crowdsourcing Technology. Using the web application, the users get the opportunity to find information that are not readily available in the internet. This process is associated with the Crowdsourcing Technology which is described in detail in the paper. An introduction to the project, the motivation, technologies, architectural decisions and designs used and future work are also discussed under different sections. I. INTRODUCTION Despites the fact that World Wide Web has become an ocean of information, there are several problems associated with these information. One such problem is that the distribution of the availability of information is not satisfactory. While there are loads of information about some subjects of interest, one may still find it difficult to find sufficient information about some other subjects. The issue becomes severe when it comes to subjects that are local to some country or region. Another problem is that there is no guarantee for the reliability of information that one can get from the World Wide Web. Further, the information available in the internet may not always be in the correct form that a person needs them to be. These issues are often experienced by many and they are the motivation for this project. The web application, named ‘Palama’, aims to address them to a certain extent. II. CROWD SOURCING TECHNOLOGY A. Introduction Crowdsourcing is a concept that emerged in recent years. It is more of a process of obtaining services, ideas or content by a larger group of people, most probably from an online community. Hence, the concept goes further than the traditional supplier-consumer theory [1]. B. Definition Crowdsourcing technology has been defined in multiple ways as it appear in a wide range of activities. Two of the popular definitions are quoted below. The definition presented by Enrique Estellés-Arolas and Fernando González Ladrón-de-Guevara, researchers at the Technical University of Valencia [2] “Crowdsourcing is a type of participative online activity in which an individual, an institution, a non-profit organization, or company proposes to a group of individuals of varying knowledge, heterogeneity, and number, via a flexible open call, the voluntary undertaking of a task. The undertaking of the task, of variable complexity and modularity, and in which the crowd should participate bringing their work, money, knowledge and/or experience, always entails mutual benefit. The user will receive the satisfaction of a given type of need, be it economic, social recognition, self-esteem, or the development of individual skills, while the crowdsourcer will obtain and utilize to their advantage that which the user has brought to the venture, whose form will depend on the type of activity undertaken” Definition presented by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson [3] “Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers” C. The key idea used in the project The above concept is applied in the system for content management. The clients and service providers are all from the community which engage with the web application. The system provides a platform for both the parties and it also includes a validation process and a payment process. These will be described in detail. III. USE CASES To understand the basic functionality of the system, it is important to know the parties involved in the system. These parties have different roles. Following are the users of the system.
- 2. Content Requesting User Content Provider (The resource person) Evaluator Administrator General Reader Following is the use- case diagram of the system. It illustrates the interactions between the users. Fig. 1. Use-case diagram of the system - Palama The role of each user is as follows. A. Content Requesting User As mentioned earlier, the main purpose of this system is to provide a platform for people to find content that are not readily available in the World Wide Web. As an example scenario, think of a situation where someone wants to find content about a historical literature work done in his local language. After searching thoroughly in the internet, if he is unable to find what he needs, he can come to Palama web based content management system and request for what he needs from the Palama community. He needs to specify a category, and a description of what he really needs. A resource person, seeing this request, can provide the required content. The role of a resource person is described next. B. Content Provider A content provider is a user of the system who has an expertise about a certain field. His role is to check the requests done by the content requesting users and provide the requested content if he is capable of doing that. A content provider sees requests done under a specific category only. And also, in a specific category, there can be many content providers too. Once a content provider submits the requested content to the system, the content goes through an evaluation process. This is how the system maintains the reliability of the provided content. If the submission passes the evaluation process, content is published in the web site and become available for general readers. There is a process to pay for all the successful content submissions too. (This is planned as future work) More importantly, a content provider can be a content requester too. Since a content provided is specialized in one or a few number of f fields only, he can always use the system for requesting content that he is not capable of finding. C. Administrator The Administrators are the coordinators of the system- Palama. They have the role of managing the user accounts of different types, monitoring the payment and evaluation processes, monitoring the performance of the web application, providing support to the users and so on. The amount of administrators are limited for the system. D. Evaluator The Evaluators are a selected panel of personnel who are specialized in different subjects and fields. They are hired by the administrators to evaluate the content submitted by content providers. The need to evaluate the accuracy and validity of the content so that the reliability of published content is preserved. E. General Reader The general reader is the user who refers any published content in the Palama web site. He may be a content requester, content provider, evaluator or an administrator. The interaction of a general reader of the system is similar to a user who refers an online content based web site. IV. DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE The Palama web based content management system uses various software engineering disciplines in its architecture design. Different views of the architecture describe the data- flow, database design, implementation and deployment of the system. A. Logical View Fig. 2. Logical view of the system - Palama
- 3. The logical view of the Palama web based content management system has three layers. In the ‘View’ layer, the User Interface is implemented. Some technologies used are, HTML 5 JavaScript CSS JQuery (templates) The ‘Business logic’ layer contains the code for processing data. Some of the basic processing operations are, Validating users Directing requests Retrieving content from database Handling user profile changes Handling user emails Handling search queries For the data processing, PHP is the language used. The third layer is the ‘Database’ layer. It is responsible for storing data and applying search queries. The Apache WAMP server is used for data storage purposes. Since the web application supports Sinhala language, the tags (key words) related to each Sinhala article are stored in the database in the tables which use utf8_sinhala_ci collation. Other article keywords are stored in tables which use latin1_swedish_ci collation. As for searching, ‘FULL TEXT Searching is used. B. Deploment View Fig. 3. Deployment view of the system - Palama The Deployment view also has three layers named, Web client Web Server Database Server The users of the Palama Web application access to the site using their web browsers. Therefore, the web browser acts as the web client. The web server is the application hosted in the web server. This includes the APIs and web application program. The third layer is the Database server. MySQL is used as the database server as Apache WAMP server is chosen for storing data. C. Implementation View Fig. 4. Implementation view of the system - Palama The implementation view illustrates the relationships between various components of the system at the implementation level. As seen, the web interface relies on the web server to get the relevant data to display while the web server depends on the database and the API libraries to retrieve and process data to pass to the web interface. D. Data-flow diagram Fig. 5. Data-flow of the system - Palama The data-flow diagram displays the flow of data between interactions done by different users. In fact, the diagram shows a complete cycle of data flow since a user requesting for
- 4. content to him receiving the content. Following are the steps in sequence. A content requester submits a request for the content he needs A content provider views the request and submits what the requested person asked for The system directs the submissions to the evaluators If the evaluation recommends the submissions to be published, the administrators publish the content The content provider is funded a certain amount of money in the meantime Once these actions are completed, the content requester and any general reader can access the content. E. High-level database schema Fig. 6. Database schema of the system - Palama The database schema diagram displays the relational database tables that were used to store data for the system and their relationships. Following are the purposes of each table. Login – details about users Request – details about the requests done by content requesters Content – the content submitted by the content providers Metacontent – meta data about the content articles Tags – tags that are used for searching the articles tagsLocal – tags stored in Sinhala language image – profile pictures of the users featured – details about featured articles that are to be displayed in the web site The schema is planned to be updated once the funding process is introduced to the system. V. FUTURE WORK The Palama web based content management system can be extended effectively in a way such that a wider range of audience can benefit from it. Also, a proper financial plan can be introduced for the funding process. Following is a description about possible future work. A. Extending the system to support more languages The Palama web based content management system currently support English and Sinhala languages only. The word ‘support’ here indicates that the article can be requested, submitted, searched and viewed in the mentioned two languages. As an initial step, the web application is targeted for Sri Lankan citizens. Therefore, the next immediate step would be to extend the system to support Tamil language. As the next step, it will be important to support more and more regional languages in order to open doors for global community to effectively use the services of the Palama web application. B. Introducing a funding plan One of the design decisions of the project is to include a funding process in which the content providers are issued payments considering their contribution and the quality of work. The money is not to be charged from the content requesters but to be paid through the administrator panel. This will both encourage the content providers to contribute more and consider more about the quality of their work. REFERENCES [1] Doan, Anhai, Raghu Ramakrishnan, and Alon Y. Halevy. "Crowdsourcing systems on the world-wide web." Communications of the ACM 54.4 (2011): 86-96. [2] Estellés-Arolas, Enrique, and Fernando González-Ladrón-de-Guevara. "Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition." Journal of Information science 38.2 (2012): 189-200. [3] Howe, Jeff. "Crowdsourcing: A Definition". Crowdsourcing Blog. (2006).