The first paper on Cohere has been accepted for presentation to COMMA, the main forum for researchers working at the intersection of computing and argument. See you in Toulouse in May!…

Buckingham Shum, S. (2008). Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation. Proc. COMMA’08: 2nd International Conference on Computational Models of Argument, 28-30 May 2008, Toulouse. IOS Press: Amsterdam [http://oro.open.ac.uk/10421/]

Abstract: Students, researchers and professional analysts lack effective tools to make personal and collective sense of problems while working in distributed teams. Central to this work is the process of sharing-and contesting-interpretations via different forms of argument. How does the “Web 2.0” paradigm challenge us to deliver useful, usable tools for online argumentation? This paper reviews the current state of the art in Web Argumentation, describes key features of the Web 2.0 orientation, and identifies some of the tensions that must be negotiated in bringing these worlds together. It then describes how these design principles are interpreted in Cohere, a web tool for social bookmarking, idea-linking, and argument visualization.