RE: [ba-ohs-talk] ClaiMaker

Wonderful!

Plenty to play with, plenty to read ;-)

One additional piece of information I'd be grateful for would be the RDF Schema used for the ontology. The tool I'm working on at the moment is in a similar space, but more of a general-purpose 'personal knowledge manager' [1], which will include discussion aspects, and for use with this I've started putting together a simple ontology [2] based on the terms used in IBIS/QuestMap. Although this won't exactly be 'scholarly discourse', some direct mappings with ScholOnto will be possible, which would allow easy interchange of data between ClaiMaker and anything I (or anyone else) come up with.

Cheers,

Danny.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org [mailto:owner-ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org]On Behalf Of Simon Buckingham Shum
Sent: 01 November 2002 15:08
To: ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org
Subject: [ba-ohs-talk] ClaiMaker

Hi all,

We've been busy implementing ClaiMaker, a tool for annotating a document's entry in a digital library (ie. not specific bits of its text, yet) with 'concepts', which you can then connect to each other with argumentation-based links (what we call a 'claim'). It's basically an interpretive layer (analogous to a Topic Map space) that sits above any digital library - a space for analysis and debate about the *meaning* of ideas, which is after all what you're really interested in if you're a researcher or information analyst (our target communities).

If we imagine a whole community adding to this, a claims network emerges that mirrors their collective interpretation(s) of their literature/resource world. Then you need support to navigate this network to filter and detect patterns. We're using vanilla graph structure analysis (eg dense clusters), as well as semantic ontology-based services that leverage the relational ontology. On the latter front, we've implemented a couple which allow you to trace the lineage of an idea (thanks Murray and Alex for Ceryle/TouchGraph visualization), find documents that 'support' or 'challenge' this one, and browse the 'neighbourhood' of incoming and outgoing concepts from a doc. If you do a structural search then the results can be viewed in TouchGraph's LinkBrowser. (for quick overview see http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/scholonto/execsum.html)

The official announcement is below... We now welcome early adopters interested to play.

There's a sandpit play area with a sample kb that gives you some test materials to understand what the Discovery Services do, and we will create you your personal/collective space if there's the interest.

How about an OHS space where any resource on which the OHS community draws can be connected to others? Not just docs, but software and messages (ideally with a URL) can be brought into the claims network.

A more detailed description is in a forthcoming book (with an Afterword from Doug). Preprint at:
Visualizing Internetworked Argumentation. Simon Buckingham Shum, Victoria Uren, Gangmin Li, John Domingue, Enrico Motta. To appear: Visualizing Argumentation: Software Tools for Collaborative and Educational Sense-Making. Paul A. Kirschner, Simon J. Buckingham Shum and Chad S. Carr (Eds), In Press. Springer-Verlag: London [http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/scholonto/docs/VizNetArg2002.pdf]

Regards,

Simon

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Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, UK
Scholarly Ontologies (ScholOnto) Project
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/scholonto/

Summary:

ClaiMaker enables you to model the claims made by research documents, and the arguments/debates about those claims. Initial visualization and analysis tools enable you to navigate and analyse the claims network.
ClaiMaker v0.2 is now released for evaluation. A test db is there for you to play with a dummy claims network, and a dedicated area can be created for you to model your own literatures.

User Documents available. Feedback welcomed!

Details:

The members of the ScholOnto project team are pleased to announce the very first test version of our rhetorical modelling system, ClaiMaker ver.0.2 [http://claimaker.open.ac.uk]. This has a form based interface for inputting models of the arguments in research papers and some simple discovery functions for exploring the data. There is a play site available at http://claimaker.open.ac.uk/Sandpit . Nothing that is built in the sandpit matters so please spend as long as you need to there. Model anything you like, or just make up some nonsense claims to familiarise yourself with the system.

If you decide that you would like to start modelling seriously in ClaiMaker please let us know and we will set up a private space for your research group.

There are two user documents attached. "Making Claims in ScholOnto ClaiMaker" talks about what claims are, and introduces you to the kind of model you can build in ClaiMaker. "User's Guide to Scholonto ClaiMaker ver 0.2" concentrates on the input functions of the current version of the software. We hope that the current generation of discovery functions will be self explantory.

ClaiMaker is an experimental system which is undergoing continual evolution. We appreciate feedback of all kinds, so please tell us what you like, what needs to be improved and what new functions would make the system easier to use.

Simon Buckingham Shum (s.buckingham.shum@open.ac.uk)
Gary Li (g.li@open.ac.uk)
Victoria Uren (v.s.uren@open.ac.uk)

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Dr Simon J. Buckingham Shum
Senior Lecturer
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA, UK
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T: +44 (0)1908 655723
F: +44 (0)1908 653169 [office] eFax: +44 (0)870 122 8765 [direct]
E: sbs@acm.org
W: www.kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs
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Jnl. Interactive Media in Education: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk
"All models are wrong, but some are useful" W. Edwards Deming
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References:

[ba-ohs-talk] ClaiMaker
- From: Simon Buckingham Shum <S.Buckingham.Shum@open.ac.uk>