Strange Aeons

What?

In a previous post I mentioned the WWAW (pronounced WOW), or World Wide Argument Web, an unwieldy name for what is mostly referred to as simply the Argument Web. My Argument Blogging project, that I have posted about here, is a part of this Argument Web which is essentially a network of loosely coupled online applications and services that provide a web of argumentation resources.

One way to think of the Argument Web is as a way to work with information on the Web. If the Web/Web2.0 is basically a semi-structured mass of data oriented towards mark-up for human consumption, then we can see how there are different ways to work with that data that are not necessarily primarily human-oriented. For example, to do automated parsing of Web data we might look to Semantic Web technologies for structure and reasoning mechanisms useable by machines. For human-orientation we look to the Web (WWW) simpliciter or else the Web 2.0 if we want more interaction. If we wanted to work with the Web in terms of arguments and associated argumentative interactions such as dialoues and conversations then we would look to the Argument Web.

The Argument Web exists in relation with and in addition to the existing webs of data and simply provides an infrastructure and tools for eliciting, structuring, and storing data in terms of arguments and related concepts, and for subsequently interacting with that data.

Why?

There are a number of reasons that an argument web is interesting. To begin with, argumentation and dialogue protocols can be used to provide a good way to elicit knowledge. Dialogue protocols provide a good human oriented interaction mechanism for both eliciting data from users and for communicating it back to them at a pace and in an order of their choosing. Allied to the this is the fact that knowledge elicitation via dialogue games allows us to capture metadata about how the units of information relate to each other. This can be sufficiently well structured that the data can be reused in automated reasoning systems, for example, as knowledge bases within intelligent agents. This is an avenue that Chris and I explored in an IEEE Intelligent Systems Journal paper a couple of years ago [reed2007magtalo :: "Using Dialogical Argument as an Interface to Complex Debates"]. Additionally, this approach provides a way to begin building a truly large scale corpus of well structured, real-world argumentation which will be an invaluable resource for argumentation researchers. Obviously this is not an exhaustive list by any means but covers the central points that make it interesting to me.

How?

The Argument Interchange Format, known as AIF, is a high level ontology of argumentation theoretic concepts that is used to communicate information about argument structure. This communication can occur between people, for example, argumentation researchers who discuss concepts such as Information Nodes( I-Nodes) and Scheme Node (S-Nodes) or who use the graph-based AIF ontology to visualise the structure of arguments and the reasoning contained therein. Communication of AIF concepts is however not restricted to people but has a number of computer implementations, for example, in RDF and OWL-DL meaning that argumentation data can be shared between programs.

The AIF-DB is a web-app for storing AIF data. It consists of a database and a RESTful interface for getting AIF data into and out of the database and also for searching it’s contents. The advantage of adopting a technology like the AIF-DB is that, unless you have special requirements over how your AIF data is stored, you have a ready made database and API that you can use from your application. This has simplified the process of building new argument software for the web and has been used as a core element in a number of new pieces of ArgumentWeb software including:

• OVA – An online agument analysis tool similar to Araucaria
• OVAView, the argument visualisation widget,
• The Argument Blogging software,
• ArgDB – An online corpus of analysed arguments which is the latest incarnation of the original AraucariaDB, the first large corpus of analysed arguments.

Floris sent me a link to this advert for a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law. The advert relates to a new FP7 project called IMPACT (not to be confused with Chris’ IMM-PACT EPSRC funded project) which aims to do the following:

IMPACT is an international project, partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework programme. It will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. To support the analysis of policy proposals in an inclusive way which respects the interests of all stakeholders, research on tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources distributed throughout the Internet will be conducted. The key problem is translation from these sources in natural language to formal argumentation structures, which will be input for automatic reasoning.

What is of particular interest to me is the idea of building new tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources on the web – very similar to the argument blogging approach to online argumentation that I have been working on recently. The main difference here though is that the prospective IMPACT tools appear to be aimed at working with the web as a static resource whereas argument blogging is meant to be an active, user-centered activity, although one extension that I am looking at is to integrate active, “no I disagree because…” type arguments with “and here is a resource to prove it…” type arguments, which I see as being a mixture of both active and static argumentation. Also similar is Mark’s OVA software, an online argument analysis tool similar to Araucaria, although currently this can only be used to analyse a single web resource not collate and resuse arguments across multiple sources.

Interestingly this project will use the LKIF, understandable given the domain in which the project is to be executed, but it makes me wonder about the possibility of tools to translate between AIF & LKIF so that resources from one domain can be accessed by tools from the other and vice versa.