We have all read something online with which we have strongly agreed or disagreed. In many of these cases we might respond via comments, if the site supports commenting, or we might post something to our own website that links back to the original. Unfortunately this approach does not enable us to capture and reuse the argumentative structure inherent in the response and its content, we cannot easily automatically determine whether your response is supporting or attacking the original post. It requires a user to read and comprehend both your post and the one you link to and to then reconstruct the arguments. Additionally, once the original author has moved on the original site might disappear leaving a broken link, or they might edit the original post to reflect a different viewpoint.
If we look back to some of the original thinking on hypertext systems, the web was meant to be more of a two-way flow of information, where someone could upload some information, and others could respond. The web hasn’t developed liked that. Although we are bit-by-bit constructing a web with more user interaction (Web2.0), with more comprehensive commenting systems and tools for annotating webpages, we still do not have a consistent, web-wide interaction mechanism for two-way argumentative dialogue on the web. Correctly implemented, such a mechanism would be very important, transforming the web from its current, fairly static nature to a dynamic, two-way flow of highly-structured information. One area that is making some headway in this direction is in the emergence of technologies like MicroBlogging, Twitter, and all of the sites now including status updates, which are making it quick and easy to publish small amounts of information to the web. This information is subsequently federated and manipulated by the emerging real time web to offer facilities like real-time search, to find out what is happening and being talked about right now. Although these are great ways to use the web, there are a few unrealised opportunities, such as storing information that captures the fine-grained structure of interactions not just the content, which presupposes taking advantage of a second opportunity, that of providing a natural pervasive argument-oriented interface for engaging in fine-grained, online debate.
The problem of information structure and storage is that information is not stored in a way that makes it easy to automatically reuse (a problem that the Semantic Web is attempting to solve), particularly from an argumentative or dialogue oriented perspective. HTML and related technologies for example store information in ways that make it easy to parse for display, whereas formats like Atom and RSS, are oriented towards syndication in a time-ordered feed of information. None of the widely used technologies are oriented towards capturing the interactions between users, links for example, carry very little information, they do not indicate whether a response is supportive or antagonistic, or even that the response is actually a response. The only information that a link really carries is that a source has a relationship to another source. One way to structure information about the arguments is through one of the Argument Interchange Format (AIF) implementations. For example using the RDF AIF implementation offers a way to store structured argument information in such a way that it can be reused by other tools, for example, by argument visualisers or automated reasoners. Because this version of AIF is implemented using RDF it is a simple process to reuse this argument information within semantic web applications. A fully realised Argument Web based upon adoption of languages like the AIF also provides a useful bridge between the Web/Web2.0 and the Semantic Web.
The opportunity for increased interaction stems from the fact that many users of the web engage in arguments and dialogue a lot. Even so, support for argumentation on the web is very rudimentary. On many sites the extent of support is that you can reply to a post by commenting, possibly this is supplemented by some support for threading of comments so that a rudimentary dialogue can be had but that is far from a given. Faced with this many users resort to either copy & pasting a portion of text to indicate what specificatlly they are responding to, or using @username to respond to a given user and hoping that it is sufficiently clear as to which specific comment of the respondee is being resonded to. The @ nomenclature has been adopted on Twitter to allow extended dialogues to occur but these are very coarse grained and it can be difficult to follow a thread of conversation for more that a few tweets. Then again the aim of Twitter is to provide a venue for rapidly posting small updates, not finely nuanced conversations articulating differing points of view. One general way to support extended fine-grained dialogues is through the use of dialogue games. Simple, multiplayer turn-taking games that model the interactions between participants during dialogue. The moves in dialogue games usually correspond to a particular type of act within a dialogue so, for example, you might make a question move directed towards a particular participant, who in their next move responds to the question move with an answer. Alternatively, a participant might make an assertion move, asserting their position on an issue, to which other participants might respond with an array of moves, for example, agreeing with, disagreeing with, or challenging the position. Such games are modelled on everyday human interactions so form the basic of quite natural interaction mechanisms for people to use – an advantage in securing uptake amongst everyday web-users.
A system for distributed online argumentative dialogue would allow us to;
- select any publically accessible section of text,
- appropriately respond to it,
- publically record our response wherever we desired so that others can continue the conversation, and
- reuse this structured information in intelligent software.
Additionally, such a system should not rely on a central server, nor should it rely on the installation of a lot of additional client-side software, or the large scale uptake of software, or channeling of users to a particular site, or a requirement for site owners to install additionaly software. Rather, the system should rely on open distributed platforms and minimal opt-in to gain access to basic functionality.
ArgumentBlogging is a term used to describe a method for argumentative interaction on the Web which is implemented in an initial prototype system (initially published at the CMNA 9 workshop) that utilises a bookmarklet and a simple dialogue game to provide a way to capure argument content and store it using the AIF.
