Cohere is an example of what we call Hypermedia Discourse. It emerges as a convergence of research and development from two projects concerned with Visualizing Argumentation and Knowledge Cartography:

• Compendium: focused on real time mapping of problems, discussions and arguments in meetings, physical and online
• Scholarly Ontologies project: focused on the future of scientific publishing when contributions to the research literature are made in the form of new nodes in a semantic network of claims, evidence and arguments

Cohere is a vehicle to explore the overlap of social and conceptual networks, for epistemic communities: people who share a common mission to articulate the nature of a problem, deliberate and debate over competing interpretations and options for action, and move towards co-ordinated action.