A group of researchers at the University of California, San Diego hopes to find the tomb of historic ruler Genghis Khan through the process of crowdsourcing.
The study, which was published in December on PLOS One, began in June 2010 and has involved over 10,000 online public volunteers participating in an archeological satellite imagery survey, according to Phys.org. These participants contributed a total of 30,000 hours (3.4 years) of human visual analytics and 2.3 million feature categorizations.
By generating inputs through tags, the volunteers managed to create a geospatial map, with potential spots of the tomb's location highlighted.
The authors say a burial of the Mongolian imperial family has yet to be identified, and the amount of undocumented cultural heritage sites throughout the barely populated, undeveloped landscape makes finding the tomb an even greater challenge.
By working with National Geographic, the team used satellite imagery create a landscape of over 84,000 tiles and made it available for the public to see on the magazine's website, Phys.org reported.
The volunteers have so far examined over 6,000 square kilometers in search of the tomb, having used complex methods like "kernel density estimation" and "analytical cross-verifications" in their search, Discovery News reported.
While Khan, the emperor of the Mongolian Empire in the early 13th century, has been known as one of the most ruthless emperors in history, his reputation has gone through several changes in recent years, having since been recognized for making great contributions to society at the time.
An article in Smithsonian.com says Khan is the ancestor to an estimated one out of every 200 people living right now. Legend says soldiers killed the tomb builders after Khan's death and that these soldiers were also killed so that knowledge of the tomb wouldn't spread, Phys.org reported.
The project has so far produced a map confirming 55 sites with archeological significance ranging from the Bronze Age to the Mongol period.
One of the main goals for the study was to emphasize the significance of crowdsourcing in archeology, with the authors saying the power of crowdsourcing, "lies not only in harnessing parallel networks for scalable analytics, but in forming the collaborative frameworks necessary to cultivate reasoning."
So far, 100 locations have been marked on the map for further inquiry, Discovery News reported.
The search for Khan's tomb continues, but the project has received a great deal of praise for its use of digital approaches to solve one of history's greatest mysteries.
