Argument mapping tools

Argument Mapping Tools (henceforth AMTs). AMTs provide a web-based user interface that allows users to co-create, navigate and edit argument maps. 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 (van Gelder, 2003). They are supposed to be particularly suited to represent controversial debates because they allow users to represent controversial point of view in a coherent structures made up of alternative positions on an issue at stake with their associated chains of pros and cons arguments.

While different studies have proved that AMTs may provide organizations with several advantages (Skyrme, 1998; Novak, 1998; Conklin, 2003), they have not received widespread diffusion. Possible explanations of the limited success of online argumentation as a collaborative technology involve factors such as the steep learning that average users are required to climb to be proficient with knowledge.

The main reason for a poor performance of AMTs in terms of grounding costs is that they are object-oriented technologies: the primary objective of an argument mapping tool is to generate a knowledge object in the form of map able to capture and organize knowledge provided by many contributors during the debate. Unlike other collaboration technologies, AMTs do not focus on the communication process itself; as a result all the information generated from communicative acts developing during the process and mostly aimed at making sense of the debate, e.g. about the participants or the generation of the content, are missing or hidden.

Argumentation technologies add two further obstacles to the conversation. First they force participants to follow pre-established communication formats and rules. Second, they disrupt the time-based reply structure of conversation: as a result contributions that in a conversation may come one after the other on a time scale could have very different locations in a map because their logical function in the debate is different..