GetSatisfaction‘s “How does this make you feel?” intrigues me: why do people answer this? Conventional wisdom says that people don’t classify their posts.
Presumably it’s polite to ask people how they’re doing — at least in some situations. And technically there’s no post classification going on here: it’s mood classification, which most of us are trained in from a young age.
Get Satisfaction aggregates the mood on each discussion thread:
Tags: customer service forums, feedback forums, forums, GetSatisfaction, help forums, mood, mood classification
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary, social web | Comments (2)
Tim van Gelder provides a taxonomy for decisions:
Deliberative and bureaucratic decisions are, I think, the most important for collaborative decision-making. Intuitive decisions, made quickly by an individual, are least important for collaboration. Technical decisions have the most interesting description: they are “made by following some well-defined technical procedure”; arguably they are not decisions.
Can you spot any overlaps or gaps? Discuss at his article.
The argumentation community has given a lot of attention to deliberation; I wonder if that has been influenced by the prevalence of deliberation in decision-making, and the difficulty of formal modelling of bureaucracies.
Tags: decision-making, taxonomies
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary | Comments (0)
Language evolves, and we use words loosely. But I’m more and more disturbed with the way “Like” is being manhandled.
Argumentation will need to encompass polarity; so I hope that it can help.
Tags: argumentation, argumentation ontologies, Facebook, like, semantics
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary, random thoughts | Comments (4)
CiTO has escaped the lab and can now be used either directly in the CiteULike interface or with CiteULike machine tags. Go Citation Typing Ontology!
To add a CiTO relationship between articles using the CiteULike interface, both articles must be in your own library. You’ll see a a “Citations (CiTO)” section after your tags. Click on edit and set the current article as the target.
First set the CiTO target
Then navigate around your own library to find a related article. Now you can add a CiTO tag.
Adding a CiTO tag in CiteULike
There are a lot of choices. Choose just one. :)
CiTO Object Properties now appear in the dropdown
Congratulations, you’ve added a CiTO relationship! Now mousing over the CiTO section will show details on the related article.
Mouse over the resulting CiTO tag to get details of the related article
Machine tags take fewer clicks but a little more know-how. They can be added just like any other tag, as long as you know the secret formula: cito--(insert a CiTO Object Property here from this list)--(insert article permalink numbers here) Here are two more concrete examples.
First, we can keep a list of articles citing a paper. For example, tagging an article
cito--cites--1375511
says “this article CiTO:cites article 137511”. Article 137511 can be found at http://www.citeulike.org/article/137511, aka JChemPaint – Using the Collaborative Forces of the Internet to Develop a Free Editor for 2D Chemical Structures. Then we can get the list of (hand-tagged) citations to the article. Look—a community generated reverse citation index!
Second, we can indicate specific relationships between articles, whether or not they cite each other. For example, tagging an article
cito--usesmethodin--423382
says “this item CiTO:usesmethodin item 42338”. Item 42338 is found at http://www.citeulike.org/article/423382, aka The Chemistry Development Kit (CDK): An Open-Source Java Library for Chemo- and Bioinformatics.
Automation and improved annotation interfaces will make CiTO more useful. CiTO:cites and CiTO:isCitedBy could used to mark up existing relationships in digital libraries such as ACM Digital Library and CiteSeer, and could enhance collections like Google Books and Mendeley, to make human navigation and automated use easier. To capture more sophisticated relationships, David Shotton has hopes of authors marking up citations before submitting papers; if it’s required, anything is possible. Data curators and article commentators may observe contradictions between papers, or methodology reuses; in these cases CiTO could be layered with an annotation ontology such as AO in order to make the provenance of such assertions clear.
CiTO could put pressure on existing publishers and information providers to improve their data services, perform more data cleanup, or to exposing bibliographies in open formats. Improved tools will be needed, as well as communities that are willing to add data by hand, and algorithms for inferring deep citation relationships.
One remaining challenge is aggregation of CiTO relationships between bibliographic data providers; article identifiers such as DOI are unfortunately not universal, and the bibliographic environment is messy, with many types of items, from books to theses to white papers to articles to reports. CiTO and related ontologies will help explicitly show the bibliographic web and relationships between these items, on the web of (meta)data.
CiTO is part of an ecosystem of citations called Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies (SPAR); see also the JISC Open Citation Project which is taking bibliographic data to the Web, and the JISC Open Bibliography Project. For those familiar with Shotton’s earlier writing on CiTO, note that SPAR breaks out some parts of the earlier formulation of this ontology.
Tags: argumentation ontologies, bibliographic data, Citation Typing Ontology, CiteULike, CITO, semantic libraries
Posted in argumentative discussions, books and reading, information ecosystem, library and information science, PhD diary, scholarly communication, semantic web | Comments (3)
I’m working on online argumentation: Making it easier to have discussions, get to consensus, and understand disagreements across websites.
Here are the 3 key questions and the most closely related work that I’ve identified in the first 9 months of my Ph.D.
Read on, if you want to know more. Then let me know what you think! Suggestions will be especially helpful since I’m writing my first year Ph.D. report, which will set the direction for my second year at DERI.
Argumentative discussions occur informally throughout the Web, however there is currently no way of bringing together all of the discussions on a given topic along with an indication of who is agreeing and who is disagreeing. Thus substantial human analysis is required to integrate opinions and expertise to, for instance, determine the best policies and procedures to mitigate global warming, or the recommended treatment for a given disease. New techniques for gathering and organising the Social Web using ontologies such as FOAF and SIOC show promise for creating a Social Semantic Web for argumentation.
I am currently investigating three main research questions to establish the Social Semantic Web for argumentation:
Ennals et al. ask: ‘What is disputed on the Web? (Ennals 2010b). They use annotation and NLP techniques to develop a prototype system for highlighting disputed claims in Web documents (Ennals 2010a). Cabanac et al. find that two algorithms for identifying the level of controversy about an issue were up to 84% accurate (compared to human perception), on a corpus of 13 arguments. These are useful prototypes of what could be done; Ennals prototype is indeed a Web-scale system, but disputed claims are not arguments.
Rahwan et al. (2007) present a pilot Semantic Web-based system, ArgDF, in which users can create arguments, and query to find networks of arguments. ArgDF is backed with the AIF-RDF ontology, and uses Semantic Web standards. Rahwan (2008) surveys current Web2.0 tools, pointing out that integration between these tools is lacking, and that only very shallow argument structures are supported; ArgDF and AIF-RDF are explained as an improvement. What is lacking is uptake in end-user orientated (e.g. Web 2.0) tools.
The Web2.0 aspect of the problem is explored in several papers, including Buckingham Shum (2008), which presents Cohere, a Web2.0-style argumentation system supporting existing (non-Semantic Web) argumentation standards, and Groza et al. (2009) which proposes a abstract framework for modeling argumentation. These are either minimally implemented frameworks or stand-alone systems which do not yet support the distributed, emergent argumentation envisioned, as further elucidated by Buckingham Shum (2010).
Tags: DERI, first year report
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary, semantic web, social semantic web, social web | Comments (1)
I’ve been arguing with Jim Pitman about how abstracts are different from summaries. The audience, I think, determines whether a text is suitable to be used as a summary.
This seems like a good example:
Lumley, J., Gimson, R., & Rees, O. (2007). Endless documents: a publication as a continual function. In Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Document engineering (pp. 174-176). Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: ACM. doi: 10.1145/1284420.1284463
Variable data can be considered as functions of their bindings to values. The Document Description Framework (DDF) treats documents in this manner, using XSLT semantics to describe document functionality and a variety of related mechanisms to support layout, reference and so forth. But the result of evaluation of a function could itself be a function: can variable data documents behave likewise? We show that documents can be treated as simple continuations within that framework with minor modifications. We demonstrate this on a perpetual diary.
This is a really interesting article from a team at HP Bristol (UK). They seem to be talking about the benefit of publishing as you go along (i.e. blogs or medical records). They call these “continual documents”.
I picked it up ((I came across a conference on ‘document engineering’ [ACM digital library, may have a paywall] while sifting through articles for my literature review. ‘Document engineering’ includes lots of stuff that’s out of scope. Some material, on structural markup,may be relevant to online argumentation.)) because the abstract seemed bizarre, but the topic seemed interesting. “Continual documents” struck me as “continual functions”. And the mention of XSLT hinted at transforming a document using its underlying structure.
Surely, I thought, this abstract couldn’t describe its contents. After glancing through it, I’m not sure: This abstract may well summarize the contents of the article. But for me, the abstract really didn’t serve as a summary: I don’t know the field, so the terminology (e.g. document engineering, Document Description Framework ((One interesting line stands out: “In DDF documents most program elements are <xslt:template/> trees.”))) didn’t clue me in.
This difference gets at what AcaWiki is trying to do: provide a place for people to discuss/summarize research articles, in the way that Wikipedia is a place to discuss/summarize topics. Neither is a place for research but both are places for experts to share knowledge, for would-be-experts to describe what they know, and for non-experts to glean a deeper sense of the world than they might have had otherwise.
Tags: acawiki
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary, random thoughts | Comments (1)
This week I’m beginning my Ph.D. in Galway, Ireland at DERI.
Things move very quickly here. Unlike a U.S. Ph.D. student, I start with an supervisor (Alexandre Passant), an academic mentor (John Breslin), and a ‘professor in discipline’ (not quite sure yet what that entails) (Stefan Decker). Before arriving, I also put in a thesis proposal, which Alex drafted and I merely tweaked:
My thesis will investigate the use of Semantic Web technologies to represent argumentative discussions in online communities—how people have discussions on blogs, wikis, etc. and how they agree, disagree. etc.—and to make these discussions machine-readable and interoperable.
Tags: DERI, Ireland
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary, social semantic web | Comments (4)
blog ‘reactions’
Instead of enabling commenting on your blog, you can let readers ‘react’ by marking the post as ‘funny’, ‘interesting’, or ‘cool’. So far I’ve only seen this on one Blogspot blog, Galway Library’s blog.
Is this post funny, interesting, or cool?
If you know whether there’s a plugin doing this, or if it’s a general (optional) Blogspot feature, please let me know in the comments.
Tags: alternatives to like, blogging, commenting, like button
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary, social web | Comments (1)