Collecting and Enriching Medical Information Through Human Computation

Despite the nowadays widespread availability of various medical information in computerreadable formats, it still remains challenging to structure and employ this information in order to improve medical services. For online health websites it is crucial to dispose of clear and concise medical information that can be served on a variety of levels to different users. With the advent of the ”informed patient”, who is deeply involved in making decisions about his health and treatment options, the available information has to be presented in such a way that both patients as well as health care professionals or other potential users are served data according to their expertise. This thesis discusses a novel way of collecting information such as laymen terms for medical symptoms, while ensuring both correctness and appropriateness of the data. It is based on human computation in the form of Games With A Purpose (GWAP) and can easily be integrated into a social health website. Finally, an approach for implementing GWAPS in a generic and extensible way is outlined.