=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-430/paper-1
|storemode=property
|title=Introduction: Bringing a New Vision to ODR
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-430/Paper1.pdf
|volume=Vol-430
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/odr/Poblet08
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==Introduction: Bringing a New Vision to ODR==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-430/Paper1.pdf
Introduction: Bringing a New Vision to
Online Dispute Resolution
Marta POBLET 1
Institute of Law and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (IDT-UAB)
Abstract. This article offers a brief overview of the state-of-the-art ODR domain
by presenting the contributions to the field made by the participants in this volume.
It also examines some of the challenges that ODR face at present with regard to
interoperability and the new evolutions of the Web 2.0. Finally, it also considers
the need for a new vision of ODR that, while keeping pace with the technological
developments of the Web, situates the users the center of the paradigm.
Keywords. Online Dispute Resolution, ODR, Decision Support Systems,
Negotiation Support Systems, Web 2.0, Semantic Web, relational justice
1. ODR in Brief
For some years now, Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) developments have been the
object of close attention in a number of research domains: negotiation studies, law,
economics, computer sciences, artificial intelligence, information systems, etc. Broadly
defined, ODR encompasses those services, processes, methods, and techniques using
ICT technologies to facilitate the resolution of disputes erupted both in online and off-
line environments. While ODR is often seen as the online equivalent of alternative
dispute resolution methods (ADR) that fall outside the judicial domain, there are some
reasons to refrain from an exact correspondence between the two. On the one hand,
ODR procedures might not necessarily satisfy the “alternative” aspect of ADR, since
they may form part of the judicial process (i.e. online mediation to assist divorcing
couples in drafting divorce agreements). On the other hand, the technical aspects of
ODR pave the way to specific procedures that vary from those applicable in ADR
(namely, automated, blind-bidding negotiation). Thus, a basic typology of ODR
processes may be summarized as follows:
1
ICREA Researcher at the Institute of Law and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, UAB
Law School, Edifici B, 08193 Bellaterra, Spain; marta.poblet@uab.cat.
1
Figure 1. ODR basic typology
The experimental projects started by the mid nineties (the Virtual Magistrate at the
Villanova University and the Online Ombuds Office at the University of
Massachusetts) already bore the promise of making the resolution of online disputes
more efficient, speedier and inexpensive, especially if compared to judicial procedures.
By 2001, commercial sites offering ODR services had reached its peak in the US
(SquareTrade, Cybersettle, SmartSettle, etc.) while experimental initiatives started to
walk in Europe (ECODIR, Médiateur du Net, etc.). The commercial development of
ODR services, nevertheless, was early impacted by the collapse of the dot.com bubble
that lead to a decline in service providers and the subsequent restructuring of the
incipient ODR market.
Notwithstanding these temporary backwards, a decade after the inception of ODR
commercial services through the Internet the largest online trading platform eBay
handles more than 40 million disputes a year, in more than 16 different languages [1].
Albeit this is by far the most impressive figure by a single ODR service provider, the
types of disputes dealt by ODR services cover an ever-growing spectrum, ranging from
early domain name disputes to intellectual property, insurance, personal injury, or
privacy cases [2].
Nevertheless, and despite its successful results in the e-commerce, insurance or
domain name disputes, the social impact of ODR remains limited. Orna Rabinovich-
Einy mindfully reflects in this volume on the present situation of ODR by analyzing the
Israeli example. These circumscribed impingements of ODR may obey to different
reasons: (i) lack of sufficient advertisement and/or public awareness about the
advantages of ODR; (ii) existence of multiple, heterogeneous procedures displayed by
public and private ODR initiatives and services that may create confusion among
potential users; (iii) lack of basic standards at the European and international level (iv)
issues such as trust, confidentiality, privacy, or security that may deter people and
organizations from using ODR services.
How daunting these challenges can be for ODR to reach full maturity? What is
needed to make ODR the default for Internet disputes and, whenever suitable, for
offline disputes? To some extent, most of these issues have already been addressed at
multiple levels. At the legislative level, the European Parliament and the Council of the
EU have recently adopted the Directive 2008/52/EC of 21 May 2008 on certain aspects
of mediation in civil and commercial matters, which prompts the establishment of basic
principles as “an essential step towards enabling the appropriate development and
operation of extrajudicial procedures for the settlement of disputes in civil and
commercial matters so as to simplify and improve access to justice.” Furthermore, the
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Directive encourages the Member States “by any means which they consider
appropriate, the availability to the general public, in particular on the Internet, of
information on how to contact mediators and organizations providing mediation
services.” [3]
Among the contributions to this volume, Arno R. Lodder presents the tasks done
so far by the CEN/ISSS Workshop on Standardization of Online Dispute Resolution
Tools (WS/Stand-ODR), set in October 2007 with the goal to specify the guidelines to
facilitate a clearer and easier use of ODR resources to the potential users. Jelle van
Veenen and Roberta Regazzoni offer an overview of Rechwijzer and RisolviOnline,
two newly started ODR tools from the Dutch Council for Legal Aid and the Milan
Chamber of Commerce, respectively. What these tools have in common, precisely, is to
make already existing services for dealing with disputes available online by means of
friendly, easily accessible user interfaces. From another point of view, John
Zeleznikow also suggests principles for the development of Negotiation Support
Systems that encourage fairness, transparency, and efficient bargaining. No doubt,
these are significant steps towards the gradual adoption of robust, reliable, and user-
centered ODR systems able to satisfy the needs of individuals and organizations as
regards the management and resolution of their conflicts.
2. Decision and Negotiation Support Systems in ODR
Since the late 1970s, Decision and Negotiation Support Systems (DSS, NSS) have been
developed to aid decision makers and also support complex negotiation tasks. In a
comprehensive historical overview, Kersten and Lai examine the field of negotiation
and e-negotiation systems through the discussion of their types, architectures, and
software applications [4]. Kersten and Lai propose to distinguish between two
generations of negotiation systems: (1) NSSs designed for a stand-alone computer or a
local-area network (typically before mid 1990s); and (2) ENSs systems which use
Internet technologies and are deployed on the Web [4]. The long-standing use of NSS
has also resulted in well-grounded empirical research on typologies of bargaining steps
[5], models of scenarios of human negotiations [6], users’ assessment of NSS [7], or
attitudes towards online mediation [8].
The contribution of both DSS and NSS to the development of ODR is
unquestionable but, conversely, the principles, requirements and goals of ODR services
also provide the development of new DSS and NSS with a practical, use-centered
agenda. This is clear for business issues and e-commerce [9] but also a reality in other
domains such as family law and insurance. In this volume, Abrahams and Zeleznikow
offer an overview of recent work on development of multi-agent architectures to
improve both DSS and NSS as part of integrated ODR environments dealing with
Australian family law. Muecke, Stranieri and Miller present Re-Consider, an Australian
family law ODR system that models judicial decisions with Bayesian belief networks
to provide disputants with decision support in their disputes.
Ultimately, among the major challenges for DSS and NSS are how to address the
needs of ever-growing Internet communities using the Web as default environment to
negotiate, manage and resolve their conflicting issues. To quote Kersten and Lai:
In order to have a more systematic and productive progress of ENS usage, which
can result in positive impacts on negotiation activities in the Internet age, it is
3
necessary to build a research framework which can serve as a foundation for
studying and comparing various ENSs, comparing different experimental results
and conducting comparative studies in market mechanisms and the use of
negotiation models in conflict management [4].
3. ODR and the Web 2.0
As Hendler et al. have recently put it “the Web is part of a wider system of human
interaction; it has profoundly affected society, with each emerging wave creating new
challenges and opportunities in making information more available to wider sectors of
the population than ever before.” [10]. At present, Web 2.0 is riding the crest of the
wave. According to Tim O’Reilly, who first coined the notion, one of the chief rules of
Web 2.0 is to “build applications that harness network effects to get better the more
people use them” [11].
As regards ODR applications, there is still an enormous territory to explore. Yet,
some experts have warned either that “too many ODR providers rely on outdated
platforms and technology because they are reluctant to make the investments in time
and resources needed to bring their platforms up to Web 2.0 standards” [12] or that
Web 2.0 may face unwanted consequences,
[T]he most obvious being that ODR itself may cease to exist. With the
ubiquity of broadband wired and wireless connectivity, the ability to roll-out
dispute resolution service online is possibly going to be seen as a normal
service provision of ADR service providers, just like automated online tech
support is now part and parcel of customer support mechanisms of many large
software companies. [13]
Nevertheless, the same experts warning about ODR lagging behind the curve of
Web 2.0 technological development already suggest possible paths to follow. In this
line, Rule also predicts that “ODR will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of these new
technologies, because they are squarely aimed at ODR’s core functionality areas:
communication, collaboration, and interactivity” [12]. Hattotuwa, having used maps to
plot election violence and the existence of high security zones that contravene
international law in Sri Lanka, considers “the use of free, web based map mash-ups for
ODR, particularly for land/territorial disputes and those that are based on natural
resources, demography and ethnic composition” [13].
But Web 2.0 is also known as “the social Web” insofar it breeds an ever-growing
number of online communities that share all types of contents (documents, images,
videos, music, etc.). And, in addition to contents, the social Web already offers
examples of communities that share knowledge and expertise in a number of areas:
business (InnoCentive), science (Rosetta@home) journalism (Spot.Us), politics
(MoveOn), education (WikiEducator), health (CureTogether), etc. Similarly, forums
and social networks store numerous records of “How-Tos” and “question-answer” pairs
that may be conceptualized and interpreted as problems linked to proposed solutions.
How ODR can benefit from collective, distributed, bottom-up knowledge on how to
manage and resolve different types of disputes? Most likely, to answer this question we
4
will need to go a step further an consider the technological developments of the new
Web generation, the Semantic Web.
4. ODR and the Semantic Web
In a visionary article, Berners Lee et al. envisaged an extension of the Web “in which
information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to
work in cooperation” [14]. While we are still some way from achieving this vision, in
the last recent years Semantic Web technologies have come to the fore bringing an
extended research agenda. As the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) puts it:
Semantic Web technologies can be used in a variety of application areas; for
example: in data integration, whereby data in various locations and various
formats can be integrated in one, seamless application; in resource discovery
and classification to provide better, domain specific search engine capabilities;
in cataloging for describing the content and content relationships available at a
particular Web site, page, or digital library; by intelligent software agents to
facilitate knowledge sharing and exchange; in content rating; in describing
collections of pages that represent a single logical “document”; for describing
intellectual property rights of Web pages (see, e.g., the Creative Commons),
and in many others [15].
The variety of applications makes the current Semantic Web “a set of semantic
islands” that will only be bridged if people share ontologies and facilitates scalable
mappings between them [16]. Ontologies and ontology mappings, nevertheless, are not
the only ways to achieve the objectives of the Semantic Web. Recent trends in
Semantic Web research propose that the top-down approach based on formal
ontologies can be enriched with a bottom-up, semantic structuring of Web contents
based on folksonomies [17, 18]. As it is well-known, folksonomies arise when different
communities of users assign keywords or tags to webs, blogs, wikis, articles, stories,
pictures, videos or other ever-growing information sources. To borrow Tom Gruber’s
words, “tags introduce distributed human intelligence into the system” [17].
Folksonomies can therefore be seen as metadata applied to unstructured people’s
experiences scattered in the Web. To some extent, they can also be approached as
lightweight shallow ontologies emerging in specific communities of practice where
users “tag” some content objects [18]. In this line, the analysis of folksonomies by
using different Web mining processes over Web communities (ranging from open
forums to specialized services such as Questions-Answers websites) can be applied to
harvest and organize knowledge from a bottom-up perspective.
Again, ODR may unlock its full potential by adopting state-of-the art Semantic
Web technologies. On the one hand, top-down ontologies would allow ODR service
providers to create broader infrastructures and platforms to enable the ODR field to
interoperate in an ecosystem of information and data sources, services and agents
(individuals, communities, organizations, institutions, etc.). In this volume, Stolarski et
al. use ontology alignment formalisms to come up with a formal description of legal
interpretations in the domain of risk management.
5
On the other hand, the analysis of folksonomies by using different Web mining
methodologies targeting different Web communities (which may range from open
forums to blogs, wikis, or specialized services such as Questions-Answers or How-Tos
websites) can be applied to harvest and organize both information and knowledge on
different typologies of conflicts and disputes from a complementary, bottom-up
perspective.
Eventually, in what this new vision of ODR may consist of? Much empirical
research is needed to provide an accurate, more detailed account. Nevertheless, it
seems reasonable at this point to state that keeping pace with the technological
innovations that are so utterly transforming the Web will also bring to a new ODR
paradigm in which the center will be neither the online component nor the disputes to
be resolved, but the individual people, communities, organizations, and institutions that
have to deal with disputes and conflicts and will use the Web to manage and get them
resolved in a more effective, efficient, and inexpensive way. This will bring to a new
vision on how disputes may be managed and resolved in the information society. This
is a vision that not only transforms the field of ODR, but also the very essence of
justice and law by making them more horizontal. In sum, a paradigm of relational
justice and law [19, 20].
Acknowledgments
The organization of the 5th International Workshop on Online Dispute Resolution, the
publication of these Proceedings, and part of this work have partially been funded by
the research projects “Semantic Web, Multimedia, and ODR: Ontologies and Platform
of Web Services for Online Mediation” (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation,
CSO2008-05536); “Ontomedia: Ontologies and Platform of Web Services for Online
Mediation” (AVANZA R&D Program of the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism,
and Commerce, TSI-020501-2008-131); “Implementation of Iuriservice: An Intelligent
FAQ for newly recruited judges” (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation,
SEJ2006-10695). I also thank Arno R. Lodder and John Zeleznikow, co-chairs of
previous ODR International Workshops, for the invaluable support they have offered
me with the organization of the present edition.
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