ArgVis: Structuring political deliberations using innovative visualisation technologies

Abstract

Argumentation, having its roots back to ancient years, is used in many aspects of everyday life, such as law, politics, education and decision making. Argument Visualisation Tools serve the need of visualizing natural language's argumentations, targeting in the elimination of the traditional community sites' disadvantages such as the lack of expressiveness. This paper presents ArgVis, an argument visualization tool, which drives the development of structured dialogues in an uncomplicated manner, without demanding from the users to hold any special technical or argumentation skills. ArgVis structures argumentations in interactive graphs that comprise: Issues, Positions, Arguments and Counterarguments. One of ArgVis' innovations relies on the ability to integrate information with relevant, user-generated content from similar tools and sites by exporting data in a machine-readable format using the SIOC ontology. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.