Amazon Mechanical Turk Developer Guide API Version 2013-11-15 Amazon Mechanical Turk Developer Guide Amazon Mechanical Turk: Developer Guide Copyright © 2014 Amazon Web Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. The following are trademarks of Amazon Web Services, Inc.: Amazon, Amazon Web Services Design, AWS, Amazon CloudFront, Cloudfront, Amazon DevPay, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Glacier, Kindle, Kindle Fire, AWS Marketplace Design, Mechanical Turk, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3, Amazon VPC. In addition, Amazon.com graphics, logos, page headers, button icons, scripts, and service names are trademarks, or trade dress of Amazon in the U.S. and/or other countries. Amazon©s trademarks and trade dress may not be used in connection with any product or service that is not Amazon©s, in any manner that is likely to cause confusion among customers, or in any manner that disparages or discredits Amazon. All other trademarks not owned by Amazon are the property of their respective owners, who may or may not be affiliated with, connected to, or sponsored by Amazon. Amazon Mechanical Turk Developer Guide Table of Contents Welcome ..................................................................................................................................... 1 How Do I...? ......................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction to Amazon Mechanical Turk ............................................................................................ 2 Overview of Amazon Mechanical Turk ....................................................................................... 2 Business Model ............................................................................................................ 2 Advantages .................................................................................................................. 3 Amazon Mechanical Turk Concepts .......................................................................................... 3 Requesters .................................................................................................................. 3 Workers ....................................................................................................................... 3 Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) ...................................................................................... 4 Assignments ................................................................................................................. 4 Approval and Payment ................................................................................................... 4 Qualifications and Quality Control ..................................................................................... 4 Questions and Answers .................................................................................................. 5 Architectural Overview of Amazon Mechanical Turk ..................................................................... 6 Making Requests .......................................................................................................................... 7 Making SOAP Requests ......................................................................................................... 7 Using SOAP ................................................................................................................. 7 Using Operation Parameters With SOAP ........................................................................... 8 The Structure of a Request Message ................................................................................ 8 Making REST Requests ......................................................................................................... 9 Using REST ................................................................................................................. 9 Using Operation Parameters With REST ............................................................................ 9 Parameters Specific to REST Requests ........................................................................... 10 Sample REST Request ................................................................................................. 10 AWS Request Authentication ................................................................................................. 11 AWS Accounts ............................................................................................................ 11 Authenticating Requests ............................................................................................... 12 Summary of AWS Request Authentication ........................................................................ 12 Calculating Request Signatures ..................................................................................... 13 Using REST and SOAP Transactions .............................................................................. 13 URL Encoding ............................................................................................................. 13 Code Samples for Request Authentication ....................................................................... 13 Understanding Responses .................................................................................................... 15 Response Messages, SOAP and REST ........................................................................... 15 The Structure of a Response ......................................................................................... 15 Understanding Requesters and Workers .......................................................................................... 17 Working With Amazon Mechanical Turk Accounts ...................................................................... 17 Using Statistics and System Qualifications ............................................................................... 17 Contacting Workers .............................................................................................................. 18 Working With HITs ....................................................................................................................... 19 Creating HITs ..................................................................................................................... 19 The Title, Description, and Keywords ....................................................................................... 20 Using International Characters ....................................................................................... 20 The Reward ........................................................................................................................ 20 Deadlines and Expirations ..................................................................................................... 20 Asking Workers to Upload Files .............................................................................................. 21 Using Your Website to Host Questions ..................................................................................... 21 The Requester Annotation ..................................................................................................... 21 Understanding HIT Types .............................................................................................................. 22 HIT Types ........................................................................................................................... 22 Properties of a HIT Type ....................................................................................................... 22 How HIT Types Are Created .................................................................................................. 23 How to Change the HIT Type ................................................................................................. 23 Properties Specific to a HIT ................................................................................................... 23 API Version 2013-11-15 iii Amazon Mechanical Turk Developer Guide Creating and Managing Assignments .............................................................................................. 24 A Worker Accepts a HIT ........................................................................................................ 24 Multiple Assignments, HIT Lifetime ......................................................................................... 25 Seeing HITs In Progress ....................................................................................................... 25 The Worker Submits, Returns or Abandons the Assignment ........................................................ 25 Forcing a HIT to Expire Early ................................................................................................. 26 Retrieving and Approving Results ........................................................................................... 26 Reviewing HITs ................................................................................................................... 27 Paying the Worker a Bonus .................................................................................................... 27 Disposing of the HIT ............................................................................................................. 28 Extending a HIT .................................................................................................................