Crowdsourcing for Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics


Author Affiliations
  1. Department of Molecular and Experimental Medicine, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA

Abstract

Motivation: Bioinformatics is faced with a variety of problems that require human involvement. Tasks like genome annotation, image analysis, knowledge-base population and protein structure determination all benefit from human input. In some cases people are needed in vast quantities while in others we need just a few with very rare abilities. Crowdsourcing encompasses an emerging collection of approaches for harnessing such distributed human intelligence. Recently, the bioinformatics community has begun to apply crowdsourcing in a variety of contexts, yet few resources are available that describe how these human-powered systems work and how to use them effectively in scientific domains.