CISpaces , towards a system for online collaborative argument construction and debate

Online debating tools enable collaboration in analysing and addressing a wide range of problems. In contexts such as e-participation in legislation, scientific inquiry or open source intelligence analysis, structured and well-formulated arguments are essential for the collaborative formation of justified viewpoints. This type of debate requires analysis of information, construction and sharing of arguments, and opinion polling. Existing tools often provide limited support for these different interaction modes. In this paper we propose CISpaces, an initial set of tools for collaborative virtual spaces of analysis of arguments and debate. CISpaces provides a uniform way of constructing and exchanging arguments based upon argumentation schemes. This structure permits autonomous reasoning to be applied for supporting the identification of plausible conclusions. In CISpaces users can access a crowd-sourcing service to gather responses from a wide audience. Moreover, the context of retrieval of information and arguments is collected in CISpaces using provenance, and this provenance data is elaborated by the system to evaluate claims according to their credibility.