It’s been a busy week full of planning, coding and brainstorming about the current state of Coner and what I envision it to be in the future. But before I update you guys on what I have been up to, let’s recap why I joined the OST KIT Alpha Phase III Challenge in the first place! In last week’s blog I introduced the Coner project; my attempt to improve the searchability of digital libraries by utilising blockchain powered collaborative human feedback on documents. Users earn Coner Tokens (CNR) from content creators for giving feedback on both auto-generated and user-contributed keywords, and as a result provide the machine learning algorithm with valuable human intelligence insights.
So why did I decide to join OST Alpha Phase III? I believe that user incentivisation through an OST powered branded token economy is a match made in heaven; whats more motivating for users than receiving token rewards for their time and efforts and using these branded tokens to get feedback on your own documents and as a result tackle the challenge of digital library exploration. In this blog I will elaborate more on how Coner will use the synergy between a blockchain powered token economy and human feedback crowdsourcing.
Now, let’s dive deeper in the progress I’ve made and how I plan to make my vision of Coner a reality in the upcoming weeks! I mainly focused on two things; restructuring, expanding and updating the RESTful API back-end of the Coner web app and brainstorming on how exactly I want to use the released Wallet-Lite features to display users’ balances and transaction histories.
Coner is built with Node.js, an Express RESTful API back-end and React.js reusable components as front-end. The OST Alpha Phase II POC version of Coner served the OST API V0, which showed potential, but featured a limited number of data endpoints and interactions. Last week I upgraded the Coner API to incorporate OST API V1.1 and I have to say the OST team did an amazing job at both improving the usability and speed of the API and adding more data endpoints with the addition of the Balance and Ledger Wallet-Lite features! Upgrading the Coner API doesn’t result in loads of flashy screenshots and design achievements to show off in this blog post, but is essential for Coner to become the user-centered document feedback ecosystem in major digital library systems. Coner’s building blocks have to be scalable, customisable and robust in order to withstand the demands of entire digital libraries using the interactive document viewer.
Brand New Features
I’m taking advantage of the Balance & Ledger Wallet-Lite API with 4 brand new Coner features:
- Live Coner Tokens (CNR) balance and value in USD calculated using the OST Balance API and CoinMarketCap API [DONE].
- Display user OST ledger with overview of all transactions in 2 places; concise ledger in navigation user dropdown and detailed ledger on user’s account page [WORK IN PROGRESS].
- Extensive admin page overhaul; improve UI, show ledgers for all users and visualise user activity [WORK IN PROGRESS].
- Ability for users to send/gift Coner tokens to each other, enabling them to become content creators by uploading their own documents and receive feedback from other users. This features will allow people to support their fellow researchers, students, or any other user by sending them Coner Tokens and motivating them to contribute to the Coner document ecosystem and gain valuable document feedback [WORK IN PROGRESS].
Content Creators & Document Evaluators
As briefly mentioned above, there are 2 types of users in the Coner blockchain ecosystem; content creators (CC) and Document Evaluators (DE). Document Evaluators are users that solely earn tokens by using their expertise and background knowledge of a domain to give feedback on document keyword relevance. Content Creators are users that upload documents with highlighted keywords and lock in a predetermined amount of their own Coner Tokens in a Document Token Pool (DTP) to be used as rewards for evaluators that give feedback on that particular document. This DTP pool acts as a maximum budget for all keyword feedback for that document. You automatically become a CC when you spend your earned Coner Tokens to upload your first document and lock in some of your Coner Tokens as budget. The required tokens can be acquired in 3 ways or a combination of them; request an airdrop from the company for your document feedback, get rewarded for your feedback on other documents and/or receive token gifts from other users (for example because they believe feedback on keywords in your document will contribute to the overall knowledge of a research domain).
Transaction Types
The Coner ecosystem integrates both company-to-user and user-to-user CNR transactions. First, CCs can request an airdrop from the company to have budget for a document upload (company-to-user). DEs are rewarded from a Document Token Pool when they rate documents’ keywords and when they finish rating an entire paper (user-to-user; CC-to-DE) and finally Coner users can send each other CNR gifts (user-to-user).
Next week I will talk about why proper user incentivisation is so important for crowdsourcing and how blockchain enhances that process, how the Coner user feedback is incorporated in the machine learning cycle and any other updates on the project, so stay tuned and see you next week!
