Knowledge collection from volunteer contributors
A subfield of Knowledge Acquisition within Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Collection from Volunteer Contributors (KCVC) attempts to drive down the cost of acquiring the knowledge required to support automated reasoning by having the public enter knowledge in computer processable form over the internet.
What may have been the first research meeting on this topic was The 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium on Knowledge Collection from Volunteer Contributors (KCVC05).
The first large-scale KCVC project was probably the Open Mind project, initiated by Push Pindar Singh and Marvin Minsky at MIT. In this project, volunteers enter words or simple sentences in English in response to prompts or images. Although the resulting knowledge is not formally represented, it is provided supplied to researchers with parses and other meta-information intended to increase its utility.
A more recent KCVC project is "Learner", produced by Dr. Tim Chklovski at ISI. This system uses more constrained questions, in an effort to produce knowledge that is more directly accessible to automated reasoners.
In late 2005, Cycorp released a KCVC system called "FACTory" that attempts to acquire knowledge in a form directly usable for automated reasoning. It automatically generates questions in English from an underlying predicate calculus representation of candidate assertions produced by automated reading of web pages, by reviewing information previously entered directly in logical form, and by analogy and abduction.