KMi Seminars
A Debate Dashboard to Support the Adoption of Online Knowledge Mapping Tools
This event took place on Wednesday 31 March 2010 at 11:30

 
Ivana Quinto

Several web tools, also known as argument mapping tools, have been developed so far, which apply an organizational and visualization approach based on argument mapping. An argument map is a representation of reasoning in which the evidential relationships among claims are made wholly explicit using graphical or other non-verbal techniques. Argument mapping provides a logical rather than time-based debate representation of users’ contributions. This representation model has proved to provide users with several advantages, such as: i. encouraging evidence-based reasoning and critical thinking; ii. improving the understanding of wide amount of knowledge; iii. driving conversation toward effective deliberation; iv. expanding our capacity to grasp more complex discussions. Nevertheless those technologies still do not have widespread diffusion and the level of adoption is low.

The aim of my PhD thesis is to investigate new technological solutions to support the adoption of argument mapping tools. The main barrier to the adoption of mapping tools is the existence of constraints to the conversation that force users to respect pre-established communication formats and rules. Moreover, the literature suggests that the loss of information and feedback during conversation represents another important barrier to the adoption of mapping tools. Therefore, the loss of immediacy, due to the formalization, coupled with the lack of information about users, interaction processes, and generated content, entails the users a higher cognitive effort and time consuming to learn how to use the tool. This makes the benefit/cost ratio too low for the average user, thus causing limited adoption (Davis, 1989). To tackle this problem, we propose a Debate dashboard in order to provide users with visual feedback about the interaction between users and the content generated by them. This feedback aims at reducing cognitive efforts and making the benefits associated with using of arguments maps more evident. The dashboard will be composed of visualization tools which deliver such feedback.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.