Thank you, Nathan. This is very much what I'm trying to accomplish, and
incorporates a lot of the elements that have gone into my design. It
appears to mimic the actual process that my tool is designed to implement.
I particularly like that it takes advantage of the wiki's cross linking
ability to allow the users to dig deeper into a more complex issue. As an
overall tool, though, it is still locked into a wiki model, which results in
certain inherent limitations. Your comment here illustrates this pretty
well.
On 4/3/06, Nathan Spaeth <loplin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
- Throughout the process (through a method yet unkown to me, maybe
voting?) every assertion would have a score that decided how much it
actually supported one side or the other, if it adequatly countered any
other assertions, etc.
For each assertion to be voted on, this would require that some metadata be
maintained about that assertion. How many votes, direction of votes, who
has already voted and in what direction so that they might change their vote
later, that kind of thing. Wikis are largely self moderated, so this
metadata would need to be tracked and stored by each of the participants or
by a central authority.
By stepping out of the wiki model we can embody each of the assertions as
its own data object. Assertion, creator, votes, links, the whole nine
yards, stored as a living object in the database. This solves the metadata
problem and allows you to automate the entire process. My design correlates
to Wikibates the same way that dynamic pages correlate to static ones.
I also suggest checking out OpenCyc (
http://www.opencyc.org). It is a
knowledge based AI with all kinds of assertions about
real world things.
This might be usable as a backend when forming arguments. You could make
assertions to the AI when adding to the debate, the AI could then use them
to check the validity of other assertions made in the current or even
other
debates. I definately thinking rating system should be added so that
specific arguments can carry more weight over others.
I'll have to look deeper into OpenCyc. A quick glance suggests that it
could be a very powerful back end resource, and may even provide a good data
model to work with.
Thanks again,
Robert