[okfn-labs] Some general question about PyBossa

Mon Jul 16 14:59:28 UTC 2012

On 16 July 2012 13:46, Maarten Brinkerink <mbrinkerink at beeldengeluid.nl> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> As a result of a brainstorm with some Dutch heritage institutions, I would like to ask a few general questions about the PyBossa framework. Disclaimer: I'm not a developer, so please forgive me my lack of technological knowledge.

Welcome :-)

> Question one: Can PyBossa currently be used to set up a crowdsourcing project to collect 'free tags' (for still images)? The current examples based on PyBossa - as far as I am aware - seem to focus on 'assignments' with fixed answers.

Yes, PyBossa can be used for crowdsourcing project for free tags for
images -- this would be very easy to do (probably a matter of 20m to
alter the existing flickerperson app for example). You can already see
an example of a richer image classification app in the melanoma
example:

http://pybossa.com/app/melanoma/presenter

Doing simple tagging would be *even* easier than this ...

> Question two: Can PyBossa currently export data to - for instance - an API of a collection database?

Yes and no.

Yes in that getting data (e.g. results of running tasks) from PyBossa
is *really* easy as it has a simple RESTful JSON API:

E.g. to get all the result from the flickrperson image classification I just do:

http://pybossa.com/api/app?short_name=flickrperson => gives the me the
ID of this app (45)
http://pybossa.com/api/taskrun?app_id=45&limit=200 => gives me the
first 200 runs of this app

No because you'd need to write a connector to get this automatically
exported to another database. However, writing this connector would be
*really* easy ...

> Question three: Can an institution that uses PyBossa for a crowdsourcing project currently monitor the contributions of an individual logged in user?

Yes. You can get the taskruns done by a given user if you know their user_id.

> Thanks in advance for you reply! Please let me know if I need to elaborate on my questions.

This sounds a really interesting use case and we'd love to help get
this working :-)

Rufus

> Best regards,
>
> Maarten Brinkerink
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