The motivation behind the concept of Knowledge Federation resonates closely with the orientation of the Hypermedia Discourse project1 and the Knowledge Cartography focus of a forthcoming book.2 We are concerned with the co-evolution of new tools and practices for “bringing together” ideas, sharing the KF orientation that meaning is always contextualised, that truth is often contested, and that social processes are central to the task of meaning-making in non-trivial domains. We try to add a sharper focus to what is meant by “social processes” by focusing specifically on the form of discourse by which problems are framed, and meaning is constructed in teams of analysts, e.g. deliberation over alternatives, dialogue seeking common ground, or rational debate and argumentation. Our work thus draws on the conceptual foundations offered by fields such as argumentation, cognitive coherence relations and organisational sensemaking. Hypermedia points to the engineering and aesthetics of managing webs of meaningful connections as visualizable networks of claims, issues, potential solutions, evidence, and so forth. One of our Hypermedia Discourse tools is Compendium3 which has an established user community whom we support online and with an annual workshop, and around which has developed a relatively well developed set of practices for effective use in sensemaking.4 A recently launched tool is Cohere5 which is a Web 2.0 platform for making connections between ideas, including argumentation. We are designing Cohere to be as open as possible, interoperable and extensible via REST services and web feeds. These tools are finding application in a wide ranging contexts, with sensemaking around climate change being a particular focus of our current efforts.6 The remainder of this paper introduces KF participants to our orientation to our shared concerns. It opens with a recent keynote address7 which motivated the concept of Hypermedia Discourse, followed by a more detailed description of the rationale behind the design of the Cohere web application.8
Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK www.kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs Abstract. This invited contribution motivates the Hypermedia Discourse research programme, investigating the reading, writing and contesting of ideas as hypermedia networks grounded in discourse schemes. We are striving for cognitively and computationally tractable conceptual structures: fluid enough to serve as augmentations to group working memory, yet structured enough to support long term memory. I will describe how such networks can be (i) mapped by multiple analysts to visualize and interrogate the claims and arguments in a literature, and (ii) mapped in real time to manage a team's information sources, competing interpretations, arguments and decisions, particularly in time- pressured scenarios where harnessing collective intelligence is a priority. Given the current geo-political and environmental context, the growth in distributed teamwork, and the need for multidisciplinary approaches to wicked problems, there has never been a greater need for sensemaking tools to help diverse stakeholders build common ground.
I want to talk about the challenge of our generation. […] Our challenge, our generation’s unique challenge, is learning to live peacefully and sustainably in an extraordinarily crowded world. [...] The way of solving problems requires one fundamental change, a big one, and that is learning that the challenges of our generation are not us versus them, they are not us versus Islam, us versus the terrorists, us versus Iran, they are us, all of us together on this planet against a set of shared and increasingly urgent problems. [...] But we are living in a cloud of confusion, where we have been told that the greatest challenge on the planet is us versus them, a throwback to a tribalism that we must escape for our own survival.
With these “minds”, a person will be well equipped to deal with what is expected, as well as with what cannot be anticipated; without these minds, a person will be at the mercy of forces that he or she can’t understand, let alone control. [...] The disciplined mind… the synthesizing mind… the creating mind… the respectful mind… the ethical mind.
The context in which we find ourselves presents problems on a global scale which will require negotiation and collaboration across national, cultural and intellectual boundaries. At the same time we are in a climate which questions claims to knowledge, and in which the quality of discourse is often poor. This, I suggest, presents both major challenges and unique opportunities for us as a community dedicated to understanding how to provide computational support for negotiating the construction of coherent, conceptual structures. We have choices about the kinds of problems we work on, the way in which we do our modelling, and the functionalities of the systems we offer. What do we have to offer?
My thesis is that part of the solution could be discourse-oriented tools to help capture, comprehend, and manage competing interpretations and arguments for action. There is a particular need to provide languages for communities to agree and disagree in principled ways. This paper considers the challenge of evolving interactive tools that are flexible enough to mediate and capture discourse between stakeholders with different perspectives, yet introduce sufficient structure to provide computational services. The Hypermedia Discourse research programme1 is focused on co-evolving the semantics, user interfaces, technical infrastructure, and human work practices to embed such tools in highly pressured, real time sensemaking scenarios, face-to-face and over the internet, as well as to support extended, asynchronous discourse lasting from a few days to many years.
to cover the diversity of verbal and written workplace communication that we want to
support, which would include the framing of problems, review of solutions, and
argumentation. Discourse communities refers to communities of practice [
The paper is organised as follows. I start by motivating the need for tools to assist
with sensemaking in socially complex scenarios, in particular, to manage discourse
when tackling wicked problems [
The world, indeed our lives, make sense to the extent that we can sustain a coherent
narrative about who we are and why we matter. If the story fragments, our identity
crumbles if we cannot re-integrate it into our narrative [
Weick’s concern is to characterise what people do in socially complex situations,
when confronted by incomplete evidence and competing interpretations : The point
we want to make here is that sensemaking is about plausibility, coherence, and
reasonableness. Sensemaking is about accounts that are socially acceptable and
credible. […] It would be nice if these accounts were also accurate. But in an
equivocal, postmodern world, infused with the politics of interpretation and
conflicting interests and inhabited by people with multiple shifting identities, an
obsession with accuracy seems fruitless, and not of much practical help, either. [
Sensemaking wrestles with conflicting interpretations, tracks technical facts with
emerging issues and ideas as the problem is reframed, and tries to reconcile
sociopolitical arguments. This is a formidable functional requirements specification for a
software tool to satisfy. Elsewhere [
Rittel concluded that many problems confronting policy planners and designers
were qualitatively different to those that could be solved by formal models or
methodologies, classed as the ‘first-generation’ design methodologies. Instead, an
argumentative approach to such problems was required: First generation methods
seem to start once all the truly difficult questions have been dealt with.
…[Argumentative design] means that the statements are systematically challenged in
order to expose them to the viewpoints of the different sides, and the structure of the
process becomes one of alternating steps on the micro-level; that means the
generation of solution specifications towards end statements, and subjecting them to
discussion of their pros and cons. [
to augment human intellect, our “collective capability for coping with complex,
urgent problems” [
like any model, it captures only key features of the world’s richness, in our case, the richness of textual prose and verbal discourse.2 However – if done appropriately – stripping out detail to focus on underlying structure can yield cognitive, computational and theoretical benefits: • Cognitive: a well designed external representation exploits the human perceptual and cognitive system to direct attention to relevant information; • Computational: a formal model also provides machines with structure to reason with; • Theoretical: the removal of detail may assist in identifying generalisable patterns across diverse contexts (see discussion of Cognitive Coherence Relations later).
The function of a medium is to make it possible for people to express, and work with, structure. Sensemaking calls for a particular kind of discourse, expressed through one or more media. Hypermedia can be thought of as the craft, art, science and engineering of managing structure, specifically, relationships, making it the primary discourse modelling medium for several reasons: • Modelling discourse relations: an utterance only has meaning in a context, that is, when juxtaposed with others before and after it, and in relation to other possible utterances that make its selection significant. • Expressing different perspectives on a conceptual space: diverse stakeholders are usually needed to define and resolve wicked problems, so support tools need to provide support for modelling flexibly, to show agreements and differences between viewpoints. • Supporting the incremental formalization of ideas: as understanding develops, so that patterns can be captured using representations that are intuitive, fast in real time usage scenarios, and expressive enough to enable computational support. • Rendering structural visualizations: to assist users in grasping complex interconnections between ideas and information. • Connecting heterogeneous content: the content that stakeholders refer to during sensemaking can range from media fragments which offer little or no obvious structure, to material sufficiently structured to support forms of machine reasoning; similarly, relationships may range from associations expressed spatially or as untyped links, to being formally grounded in a known semantic schema. 4.1 Key Characteristics Bringing these concepts together, we can define a class of tools designed to model discourse as hypermedia networks, with the objective of making the process and product of discourse tangible and manipulable through the combination of: • A discourse ontology: A set of explicit constructs that express a subset of the richness of human verbal or written communication. An example (discussed
source texts, audio and video as richer resources for humans (and possibly machines) to
supplement the discourse model.
below) is IBIS; another that we have been developing is the ScholOnto discourse
schema [
We are aiming for a tool which in the hands of skilled users, can facilitate the capture and structuring ideas, not only to model discourse, but also to model problem domains in a manner that invites and structures contributions, whether this is in a synchronous or asynchronous discussion. It is optimised for use in what is arguably the most demanding context of deployment for a knowledge representation tool: real time collaborative modelling. The software is a free Java application for all platforms, including the source code. Downloads and other community resources are coordinated via the not-for-profit Compendium Institute: www.CompendiumInstitute.org 5.1 Ontology
schemes such as MacLean et al’s Questions-Options-Criteria (QOC) [
The discourse-orientation of the approach, and the demands of real time
participatory modelling to capture the progress of meetings, have led to a number of
notational strategies. A root Issue (signalled with a question mark icon) provides
the orientation to a map, establishing the problematic context for the discussion: Why
are we here? To tackle this issue. Two discourse modelling methodologies have
developed around the capabilities of Compendium. Dialogue Mapping is a set of skills
developed by Conklin [
deriving Issues from a modelling methodology (or for instance, an organizational procedure/best practice). Issue nodes can be saved as reusable issue-template structures to seed different kinds of discussions. Fig. 2 shows a fragment of one template, with Idea icons serving as placeholders for responses. These lead to consequent Issues to be considered (on the right).
In addition, the modelling methodology specifies that the placeholder Ideas appear in three different views, indicated by the numeral 3 on each Idea icon. Rolling the mouse over this numeral displays a menu of hyperlinks to these other views. When views are labelled informatively, this facility provides rich context at a glance to the different ‘conversations’ in which a node is being discussed. Node label autocompletion assists the reuse of these granular chunks, offering users a menu of existing nodes which they can select from as they type.
methodology). Conversational Modelling enables the real time capture of both expected, well-structured information through the use of issue templates, with the flexibility to capture unexpected, ad hoc information and discussions as they arise.
using a variety of conventions. In a NASA field trial (Fig. 3), science metadata was represented using templates which look like visual forms, with each Issue inviting the team to answer (or if necessary debate) the values of the ‘slots’.
An issue-template such as this provides a user-friendly way to engage in participatory modelling which permits argumentation if necessary, and results in a set of semantic assertions amenable to automated analysis (data entry into a simulation engine in this case). Each Issue in fact embodies the relational semantic connecting its answer to the entity represented by the containing map. However, rather than ask the team to complete sets of semantic triples, they are offered a set of question mark icons to which they need to link lightbulb icons. Thus, Fig. 2 provides an interface to elicit
Fig. 3. The science team completes a template which will be later read by a software agent the structured assertion <user’s answer> will_be_affected_by <emerging problem 1>, while FIG. 3 will elicit <WorkSiteWater> hasPerformer <user’s answer>.
requirement in real time mapping under pressure – link types are set to be unlabelled by default, with the semantics loaded on the nodes’ iconic language. Every link can be classified and labelled if desired using the default IBIS linkset, or a user defined linkset. 5.3 Intuitive User Interface There are many improvements that could be made to Compendium, but as the preceding figures show, it looks familar to users of concept mapping or graph-editing applications. It comes with IBIS preloaded, and hypermedia functionality which makes it simple to (i) create navigational links to a given database view, and (ii) reuse a hypertext node simultaneously in different views by copying and pasting. A keyword tagging scheme combined with search assists with filtering nodes across many maps.
working through a tutorial on the Compendium Institute website. End users can express quite sophistcated data and relationships without needing to perform complicated technical actions or remember arcane commands. The user feedback on the website reflects the personal sense of satisfaction that users have with the tool. 5.4 Computational Services
notation, user interface, and the human and machine reasoning these enable.
off information about the state of an analysis that is not immediately obvious, either in conventional text documents or other concept mapping approaches. This includes unresolved issues, competing ideas, the extent to which explicit evidence is used to back ideas, and the ‘depth’ of node reuse and tagging (an indicator of the degree of modelling utilised).
When Compendium is interfaced to other tools, its database can be automatically
populated or reasoned about. Examples include the use of software agents to
autonomously read data and pass this to a simulation and planning engine, and also to
populate the database with multimedia data for subsequent analysis by scientists [
Most recently, we have automated the exchange of Compendium data with an RDF
triplestore, in order to deliver a video conferencing capture and semantic replay tool
[
developed in the Scholarly Ontologies project.3 Unlike Compendium, which simply offers Web exports and supports the embedding of websites in IBIS conversational models, these tools were conceived from the start as distributed Web applications.
current prose document and associated practices for publishing and contesting research results and – equally significant – authors’ interpretations of their significance. Within current research into ‘e-Science’ (UK) and ‘Grid/cyberinfrastructure’ (USA), this is a neglected part of the scholarly lifecycle, which is ironic: we engage in research in order to substantiate knowledge level claims. Perhaps, however, the absence of activity in this latter stage of research should not surprise us, because we are of course dealing with the difficult issue of computational support for an intrinsically pragmatic process, by which a discourse community (in this case, research peers) negotiates what some reported facts should be taken to mean. The emerging Pragmatic Web community has as a primary focus the interplay between formal representation and context, conversations and commitments to action, and it will be interesting to see how this takes shape.
associated suite of tools for authoring (ClaiMapper), querying (ClaimFinder) and the
collaborative, semantic annotation (ClaimSpotter) of research claims and
argumentation. These are less mature than Compendium, proof of concept research
tools which are not publicly available. Space precludes as detailed a treatment as
Compendium, but ClaiMaker’s ‘hypermedia discourse profile’ below conveys the
essence of the approach:
• Discourse ontology: A two-layer relational taxonomy which provides base
relational classes in which ‘dialects’ from different discourse communities are
grounded (Fig. 5).
• Notation: A conceptual graph of claims that can be visualized using different
schemes to show discourse connections between concepts annotated onto the
literature.
• User interface: We have investigated a variety of interaction paradigms for
annotation tools, in order to help untrained users create semantic annotations.
• Computational services: The use of a richer discourse scheme than IBIS
enables us to offer more powerful services. For instance, the semantic citation
maps can be filtered in response to queries such as, What documents report data
that challenges this author’s hypothesis?What is the lineage of this concept: the
key ideas on which this work builds? (Fig. 6)
• Literacy and fluency: Being less mature than Compendium, we do not yet
have a large enough user community to provide a good description of what it
means to read and write such argumentative networks, particularly beyond
initial learning. Our empirical studies provide insight into how untrained and
more expert users construct and query claim networks [
scale forces us into sensemaking activity. The requirements on tools to support such work have motivated basic and applied action research into a new class of Hypermedia Discourse tool to mediate, structure and augment the expressing and contesting of perspectives that may agree and disagree in principled ways. Such tools are hybrids borrowing from concept mapping, information visualization, discourse relations and decision-support. We need tools flexible enough for real time use in meetings, structured enough to help manage longer term memory, and powerful enough to filter the complexity of extended deliberation and debate on an organizational or global scale.
I suggest that this focus on the intersection of discourse and hypermedia provides
insights into a number of pressing problems:
• We have to talk. The only way that anything is accomplished in this world is by
people talking, building trust and sufficient common ground that they can frame
problems in mutually meaningful ways, and commit to action in mutually
acceptable ways. The challenge for a community such as ours is understand how to
weave software support into the social fabric without ripping it, but possibly in the
process, enriching that fabric to exploit the new threads we have to offer. The work
summarised here points to possible ways to evolve network-native infrastructures
for synchronous and asynchronous discourse, that step out of the shadow of the
printing press and conventional meetings (building on their strengths, but
transcending their limitations).
• Modelling in the absence of consensus. Knowledge-based systems (including for
our purposes the data models and ontologies underpinning the Semantic Web)
encapsulate consensus models of the problem domain, and how to reason about it.
How can we provide computational services in the absence of consensus, when one
group’s assumption is another group’s problem? This is the domain of discourse,
especially argumentation, in which we provide a language for stakeholders to agree
and disagree in principled ways. Compendium uses a semiformal network
representation optimised for real time use. ClaiMaker uses finer grained semantics
for modelling asynchronously in a more detailed manner.
• Negotiating the knowledge capture bottleneck. In knowledge engineering, but
also in less formal approaches to Knowledge Management (KM), Organizational
Memory and Design Rationale (DR), the cost/benefit tradeoff must be negotiated
to acquire useful abstractions of naturally occurring activity, and experts’
descriptions thereof. The Compendium approach emphasises the collaborative
modelling of information, ideas and argument in order to add immediate value to
the users (useful working memory), as well as seeding the long term memory
required for KM. This has, for instance, provided a way of tackling the DR capture
bottleneck [
associated with high performance discourse modelling, and develop conceptual
frameworks that recognise the complexity of modelling, mediating and mapping real
discourse about wicked problems. Specific challenges we are working on include:
• Distributed, online apprenticeship in hypermedia discourse. The Compendium
community now has members who are recognised ‘expert mappers’, but they are a
scarce resource. A very applied concern is how to use the internet to spread this
literacy through the creation of e-learning resources and ‘e-apprenticeship’.
• Social networks and folksonomic tagging. Behind a conceptual structure are
people. We are integrating our social networking tools with our conceptual
networking tools to support Open Sensemaking Communities, learners and
educators who must self-organise around open source learning resources, but by
extension, any epistemic community on the internet. Based on the ScholOnto
project, we have prototyped and formatively evaluated a next generation social
bookmarking tool for linking tags via discourse connectives, moving from the
annotation of isolated keywords on web reosources, to a mode knowledge
construction and negotiation: from tag clouds to tag webs [
Hypermedia Discourse tools provide a way to move fluidly between the different minds: a way to provide representational scaffolding for disciplined modelling, but permitting the creative breaking of patterns when needed and the forging of new syntheses; a way to show respect for diverse stakeholders’ concerns by explicitly integrating them into the conversation; a way to bring into an analysis ‘messy’ requirements such as ethical principles, as well as hard data and constraints. We have some evidence from our case studies that we’re on the right track, but there remains much to do.
development has been funded by the UK’s research councils EPSRC, ESRC and
was funded by the EPSRC, and is the product of work with Victoria Uren, Gangmin
and Flora Hewlett Foundation is now supporting the work through the Open
Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation
Simon BUCKINGHAM SHUM*
Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK Abstract: Students, researchers and professional analysts lack effective tools to make personal and collective sense of problems while working in distributed teams.
Central to this work is the process of sharing—and contesting—interpretations via different forms of argument. How does the “Web 2.0” paradigm challenge us to deliver useful, usable tools for online argumentation? This paper reviews the current state of the art in Web Argumentation, describes key features of the Web 2.0 orientation, and identifies some of the tensions that must be negotiated in bringing these worlds together. It then describes how these design principles are interpreted in Cohere, a web tool for social bookmarking, idea-linking, and argument visualization. 1. Introduction: The Need for Distributed, Collective Sensemaking Tools The societal, organizational, scientific and political contexts in which we find ourselves present problems on a global scale which will require negotiation and collaboration across national, cultural and intellectual boundaries. This, I suggest, presents both major challenges and unique opportunities for us, as the community dedicated to understanding computational support for argumentation: our challenge is to work with relevant stakeholders to co-evolve new practices with flexible, usable tools for communities to express how they agree and disagree in principled ways, as part of building common ground and mutual understanding.
While our previous work has focused on the real time mapping of issues, dialogue
and argument in contexts such as e-science teams [
Correspondence to: Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK.
Tel: +44 (0) 1908 655723; Fax: +44 (0) 1908 653196; http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/sbs
2. The Web 2.0 Paradigm
A lot is being written about the Web 2.0 paradigm, a term first dubbed in 2004 [
Another way in which this emphasis expresses itself is in the new generation of
tools that make it easy to publish one’s opinion of the world. Free, remotely hosted
blogging tools such as Wordpress and Blogger make it very easy for non-technical
users to create a personally tailored journal or diary and syndicate their ideas. Blogs
demonstrate one way to negotiate the formality gulf successfully, providing expressive
freedom (essentially, traditional prose and graphics), with just enough structure to reap
some benefits of hypertext (entries are addressable as URLs, timestamped, tagged, and
syndicated as web feeds – see below). The limitation of blogging at present is that like
the Web at large, there are no semantics on the links between postings, thus failing to
provide any support for an analyst who wants to gain an overview of the moves in a
debate, or indeed, any kind of inter-post relationship.
2.3. Social Networks
Web 2.0 applications are dominated, although not exclusively restricted to, sites that
either seek explicitly to connect people with people, often via the artifacts that they
share. They are designed such that the greater the numbers participating, the higher the
return on effort invested. Social tools provide a range of ways in which users are made
aware of peer activity, for instance, alerting when another user ‘touches’ your material
(e.g. by reusing it, making it a favourite, tagging it), or by mining social network
structure to suggest contacts in a professional network. Social tools also provide
mechanisms for building reputation, from the trivial (how many “friends” one has), to
potentially more meaningful indices, such as authority based on the quality of material
or feedback that a user posts, or professional endorsements.
2.4. Data Interoperability, Mashups and Embedded Content
A core idea behind the Web 2.0 paradigm is access to data over the web from multiple
applications. Web feeds using RSS and Atom have become the lingua franca for
publishing and subscribing to XML data in a simple manner that many non-technical
users now handle daily. Public APIs and web services enable the more sophisticated
access that enterprise architectures require, while semantic web services promise to
overlay ontologies on these layers so that they can be configured according to function.
“Mashups” of data sources fuse disparate datasets around common elements (e.g.
geolocation, person, date, product), often accessed via customisable user interfaces such as
Google Maps [
The phenomenal growth of web applications such as Google Maps, YouTube,
Flickr and Slideshare is in part due to the ease with which users can embed remotely
hosted material in their own websites. By providing users with the ‘snippet’ code
(which may be HTML or JavaScript), such applications empower users to in turn
provide their readers with attractively presented access to the material, which can in
turn be embedded by those readers in their sites. The material thus spreads ‘virally’, as
the links to a resource increase: it is no longer necessary to visit a web page to access
its content.
3. Web Argumentation Tools
A significant strand in COMMA research focuses on the design, implementation and
evaluation of practical software tools for creating and analysing arguments. Following
the entity-relationship modelling paradigm that lends itself so well to software, as well
as the work of pioneering argument and evidence mapping theorists such as Wigmore
and Toulmin, these tools provide a way to construct arguments as structures comprising
semantically linked elements taken from one or more argumentation schemes. The
argument structures may be left implicit behind text-centric user interfaces, or rendered
explicitly as trees or networks to help the author and reader visualize and edit the
argument [
In light of the high design standards and new possibilities that the Web 2.0
paradigm sets, it is clear that existing tools have limitations. First, there are desktop
applications like Compendium [
Finally and most relevant, there are a number of Web-native applications, designed
from the start to support large scale, multi-user construction. Some websites now
provide a very simple structure for structuring the two sides of a debate, while others
provide a more articulated argumentation language. Beginning with the least structured,
we see the emergence of sites such as Debatepedia, which is modelled on Wikipedia,
providing a debating resource showing unstructured prose arguments for and against a
particular proposal, demarcated in two columns [
Parmenides is designed to support web-based policy consultation with the public,
and incorporates a formal model of argumentation [
ClaiMaker [
TruthMapping goes much further than this, aiming specifically at tackling some of
the limitations of threaded discussion forums, with a clear distinction between
unsupported premises, which when supported become claims, and a way to post
rebuttals and responses to each of these [
Cohere is, therefore, styled to invite playful testing by people who may not first and foremost be interested in argumentation. Instead, the website invites them to make connections between ideas. This broader framing aims to meet the need of many sensemaking communities to express how ideas or resources are related (whether or not this is argumentative) in a way that goes beyond plain text blog postings, wikis or discussion forums. A typical pair of connected Ideas in Cohere is illustrated in Figure 1. In Cohere, users are free to enter any text as an Idea and its detailed description. The examples seeding the database convey implicitly that Idea labels are generally short and succinct. Users are encouraged by the user interface to reuse existing Ideas, with an autocomplete menu dropping down as they type to show matching Ideas already published: as far as possible, we want them to describe the same Idea using the same label.
Users must, however, constrain their contributions by: creating labelled connections between Ideas (e.g. is an example of) reusing, or creating, a connection from a list of either positive, neutral or negative connections Users can optionally: assign roles to Ideas (e.g. Scenario; Problem) add descriptive details (displayed when the Info icon is clicked) assign websites to Ideas (listed when the Idea is selected)
The Cohere data model is inherited from the ClaiMaker prototype [
The provision of mechanisms to enable flexible linking of web resources around
what we are calling Ideas is a goal shared by the Topic Maps community [
While not mandating that the user engage in argumentation, the language of
deliberation and argument is nonetheless at the heart of Cohere: (i) the roles that Ideas
can play in a connection include the IBIS scheme’s Question, Answer, Pro, Con and
the user can define new ones (e.g. Datum, Claim, Warrant for Toulmin); (ii) the
connection types offered to users are clustered by positive, neutral or negative polarity,
with defaults including discourse moves such as proves, is consistent with, challenges,
refutes. These default connection types are also leveraged in the predefined
visualization filters offered by the Connection Net tab, described later (Figure 6).
While the interface makes it clear that users may choose to ignore the defaults and
create their own connection language, and the roles Ideas can play, the fact that all
connections are classed as broadly positive, neutral or negative provides a way to
express not only disagreement in the world of discourse, but could signify inhibitory
influence (e.g. in biological or ecological systems modelling), or antagonistic
relationships (e.g. in social networks). It is entirely up to the individual or team to
define their modelling scheme.
4.2. Visualizing IBIS-Based Dialogue Mapping in Cohere
The default roles that an Idea can play in a connection are Questions, Answers, Pros
and Cons, derived from the Issue-Based Information System (IBIS) developed by Rittel
[
Our previous work has demonstrated the value of real time IBIS dialogue mapping in meetings, and the use of IBIS as an organising scheme around which an analyst can map, asynchronously, the structure of public policy debates which can then be published as read-only maps on the Web [31]. Cohere now provides a platform for collaborative deliberation and debate mapping over the internet, with primarily asynchronous use in mind to start with. (Real time mapping requires a tool like Compendium which has a user interface optimised for rapid mapping. However, it is our intention to optimise for real time mapping in the longer term, perhaps by adapting Compendium as an applet for Cohere). 4.3. Visualizing Argumentation Schemes and Critical Questions in Cohere In related work [32], we have demonstrated how Walton’s argumentation schemes and associated Critical Questions, rendered as XML files in the Argument Markup Language [33], can be transformed into Compendium XML and expressed as IBIS structures in Compendium. The resulting argumentation scheme templates can now be modelled in Cohere as illustrated in Figure 3. 4.4. Social Networking and Reputation All Ideas other than one’s own have their owner clearly indicated iconically. Clicking this displays the user profile, making it possible to learn more about the person behind the ideas. We are beginning to add metrics to make users aware when they arrive at the site how many active users there are, and what the most recently posted, reused and linked Ideas are. Web feeds in the future will enable users to request notification whenever one of their Ideas is embedded in someone else’s connection, or in someone else’s website (see below). 4.5. Interoperability: Web Data as Platform Central to O’Reilly’s notion of Web 2.0 is the notion of web data as the platform on which many applications can compute. Cohere exposes and consumes data in a variety of ways: Publishing and importing XML Web feeds Importing XML data from the Compendium offline dialogue and argument mapping tool Embedding pointers to its data in other applications as URLs and HTML ‘snippets’ Exposing data in a variety of standards to engage different communities
Web feeds: Cohere seeks to build on the significant effort that many users already invest in social bookmarking with folksonomic tagging tools such as del.icio.us, or in blogging with tools such as Blogger or Wordpress. These are currently two of the most dominant ways in which users share their views, and Cohere aims to leverage this by enabling users to import/refresh the Web feed (RSS or Atom) for any bookmarking or blogging site. Entries are converted into Ideas and annotated with the relevant URL, ready for linking. We are in the process of implementing an RSS feed so that users can track new Ideas as they are published. We plan to develop this capability, so that individual Ideas can be subscribed to, with alerts everytime someone connects to or from them.
Ideas and views as URLs: It is increasingly hard to find an artifact or building these days without a URL on it. The web depends on the URL as a way for nontechnical users to connect web pages, save searches, and disseminate sites of interest via standard tools such as email, slides and wordprocessors. The design of URLs goes beyond cool top level domain names, to the art of URLs that communicate their content to people, in contrast to machine-generated addresses that have no obvious pattern.
It was considered essential, therefore, to make Cohere’s content addressable and accessible as URLs. This required the creation of a guest login status for non-registered users to successfully reach an address, and the design of a URL syntax that specified the visualization type and search criteria. The URL for an Idea, a triple, or a Connection List/Net is accessed by the user in what has become the conventional manner, by clicking on a URL icon to copy and paste the address that pops up.
Embedding ideas and views in other websites: Once a URL addressing scheme is in place, it becomes possible to provide such embeddable snippets for users, as introduced above. Pasting this <iframe> code into a web page creates an embedded, interactive view onto the Cohere database, which reproduces the buttons to get the URL and snippet code, to encourage further dissemination (Figure 4).
Multiple Import/Export data formats: By the time of the conference, we will have implemented further data formats for importing and exporting Cohere structures. A priority is to provide Argument Interchange Format compatibility, with other candidates being Topic Maps, Conceptual Graphs, and OWL. 4.6. Mashup Visualizations Our objective is to help forge links not only between Ideas, but between the people publishing them. As Cohere starts to be used, it is inevitable that popular Ideas will be duplicated: if the site is successful, we can expect many people to be working on the Idea Global Warming, or making reference to everyday concepts such as Capitalism or World Wide Web. We have started to design views that help render the structures that will result from many users working on common Ideas. This is a long term challenge, but Figure 5 shows the first tool called Connection Net, which uses a self-organising graph layout algorithm that can render all of one’s personal data, or filtered views of the world’s data. In particular, Ideas with a border are used by more than one person, and as shown, right-clicking on it enables the user to view all the owners of that Idea. In this way, just as folksonomies enable disparate users to discover related resources and people, Cohere aims to reveal new connections and users working on the same Idea, or perhaps more interestingly, making similar or contrasting connections.
Filter buttons in the Connection Net view make use of the connection types, as shown in Figure 6. A number of saved filters are shown, for example, Contrast searches the database from a focal Idea on a specific subset of connection types of a contrasting nature, e.g. challenges, has counterexample, is inconsistent with, refutes. Users can define their own custom searches, and in the future will be able to save them as shown in the example buttons. 4.7. Implementation Cohere is implemented on Linux, Apache HTTP server, MySQL database, and PHP. The user interface exploits the AJAX approach to caching data in the browser to create a highly responsive interface, with few delays between action and feedback. Cascading Style Sheets are used extensively to control presentation. In addition, a Java applet from the Prefuse information visualization classes [34] has been customised to provide self-organising, interactive graph visualizations under the Connection Net tab. Compendium (op cit) serves as an offline mapping tool (a cross-platform Java desktop application with Apache Derby or MySQL database). Data is uploaded to Cohere currently using the Compendium XML scheme. Cohere is currently a freely hosted application, and an open source release is planned by end of 2008. 5. Present Limitations, and Future Work This project is tackling a complex but important challenge: to create tools providing a compelling user experience by harnessing two forces that seem on first inspection to pull in opposite directions: on the one hand, informal social media with low entry thresholds and few interaction constraints, and on the other, mechanisms for structuring ideas and discourse. We have presented the design rationale behind Cohere, a web application for structuring and visualizing information and arguments, publishing Ideas, and discovering new intellectual peers. In order to balance the informal+formal design criteria, we bias to the informal, with interface and architectural mechanisms to add structure as desired. Understandably, Cohere is being trialled initially by individuals testing it for personal reflection and information management, but ultimately, we hope to augment distributed communities engaged in intentional, collective sensemaking.
We are now in disussion with other COMMA research groups to explore how their
argument modelling approaches could be integrated with Cohere. We are moving to a
web services architecture [cf. 35] and plan to enable data exchange via the W3C’s RDF
and OWL, and the proposed Argument Interchange Format [
Finally, our goal with Cohere is to provide an environment for the emergence of social and argument structures. While not currently exposed in the user interface, Cohere has built into its data model the Cognitive Coherence Relations modelling scheme described in the COMMA’08 debate modelling paper by Benn et al. [36], which seeks an integrated approach to modelling social networks and argument networks. A future objective is to investigate this modelling paradigm within Cohere. Acknowledgements: Cohere is implemented by Michelle Bachler, with contributions from Michele Pasin and Alex Little, to whom I am indebted. The Open Sensemaking Communities Project [www.kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/osc] is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as part of the Open University’s OpenLearn Initiative [www.open.ac.uk/openlearn]. 6. References