The ARG-tech tool for Online Visualisation of Argument, OVA, is released today. For the past eighteen months, OVA has been in use in beta form by research groups and educators around the world, with their feedback and suggestions helping to improve the software.

OVA provides a simple and intuitive interface for analysing argumentation, and is a native Argument Web tool which means that it can interact with the wide variety of other applications and systems which use AIF, including Araucaria, Argublogging, argugrader and others.

OVA runs in a browser and can be used to analyse text files or web pages. It provides argumentation schemes for capturing stereotypical patterns of reasoning, and also conflict schemes for capturing patterns of rebutting and undercutting attack. Analyses can be saved locally or directly to the Argument Web where they can be navigated using the AIFdb search interface, corpus management and other tools. It also supports online collaborative working, allowing remote teams to work together on argument analysis in real time.

OVA can be found online at http://ova.arg-tech.org (or, if you would rather play with a test deployment that does not add its data to the live Argument Web servers, you can try http://test.ova.arg-tech.org)

This is the first public release of OVA, and as usual we are keen to get comments and feedback.

A short video introducing OVA is also available.

We are this week releasing a set of simple tools for using AIFdb to manage argument corpus resources. All of our previously released corpora are available as datasets in AIFdb, including AraucariaDB.

The tools are available at corpora.aifdb.org, and there is a short video describing how to use them:

A new version of the dialogue support tool Arvina is coming together. Arvina

• accepts any dialogue protocol specification (expressed using an extended version of DGDL),
• allows an arbitrary starting point in the Argument Web,
• automatically creates agents which are populated with data corresponding to statements that individuals have contributed to the Argument Web, and then
• supports an online mixed initiative debate involving one or more users plus the automatically created agents, which
• updates the Argument Web with appropriate AIF structures as the dialogue proceeds.

You can see a sneak preview of fully generalised mixed initiative argumentation in this video.

Continue reading →

A full beta of several key parts of the infrastructure for the Argument Web are released today.

AIF-compliant Argument Web servers at Dundee provide the backend support, though you can also download the database schema if you want to host your own.

The databases here include examples from a number of popular tools including Rationale, Carneades and Araucaria, along with additional arguments analysed and produced as a part of the EPSRC-funded Dialectical Argumentation Machines project.

Access to the databases is via a search interface which provides access to both entire argument maps and a dynamically navigable claim-to-claim view.

Finally, the AIFdb at Dundee also provides import and export functionality to form Argument Web interfaces to Rationale, Carneades and Araucaria, as well as providing export to DOT and SVG. Existing files in these formats can be uploaded online, and argument maps can be downloaded from the AIFdb interface.  The ontology which drives the Argument Web is expressed in OWL, and all resources are also submittable and available from the databases in RDF.

In the coming weeks, additional tools for updating, manipulating, searching and navigating argument web resources will also be made available along with APIs and other programmatic interfaces.