Crowdsourcing used in Genghis Khan tomb search
Researchers from the University of California San Diego have written "Crowdsourcing the Unknown: The Satellite Search for Genghis Khan," published last month on PLOS ONE, the peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication. Briefly, they charged an online crowd of volunteer participants with the challenge of finding the tomb of Genghis Khan. Their field expedition to look for this tomb was designed to engage tens of thousands of public volunteers and generate contributions towards an archaeological satellite imagery survey. The crowdsourcing figures attributed to the study are impressive: Over 10,000 online volunteers contributed a combined total of 30,000 hours (3.4 years) of human visual analytics, calculated from user interaction time logs, and generated 2.3 million feature categorizations.