Improving service processes with the crowds

Abstract

With the development of service-oriented computing, more and more Web services are provided for users. However, there are situations that services or service processes cannot meet users' requirements in functional QoS dimensions (e.g., translation quality in a machine translation service). Meanwhile, the emergence of crowdsourcing makes various types of tasks done in more and more efficiency ways with low costs. To consider both functional QoS and non-functional QoS, in this paper we try to combine crowdsourcing activities with service processes. Further, this study aims at analyzing the effects of crowd activities on service processes in the real world. We use a case study in the domain of language service with a large scale experiment to show that composing crowd activities and Web services brings variety and creativity to the traditional service processes and human processes. From the experiments and analysis, we find out that quality of crowd activities is essential to service processes, and that crowd activities with high quality can significantly improve various QoS dimensions of the service processes. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.