Bossa overview

Bossa is a software framework for "distributed thinking" - the use of volunteers on the Internet to perform tasks that require human intelligence, knowledge, or cognitive skills. Examples of such projects include Stardust@home and GalaxyZoo?. Bossa serves roughly the same function as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, but is simpler and more powerful, and is open source.

Volunteers have different skill levels; they may do tasks well or poorly, and a few of them may intentionally do tasks incorrectly. One can achieve an overall level of accuracy that is higher than the population average using replication - having multiple volunteers do each task, and comparing the results. Replication is also useful for tasks that do not have a unique correct answer, and for which you want to collect alternatives.

Diverse requirements of distributed thinking

How Bossa addresses these requirements