An approach to facilitating communication of expert arguments through visualisation
| Pages | 27-36 |
| Date | 01 February 2006 |
| Published date | 01 February 2006 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14779960680000279 |
| Author | David J LePoire |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
An approach to facilitating communication
of expert arguments through visualisation
INTRODUCTION
Development of new technologies offers opportu-
nities and risks that enable increased control
requiring decisions. These decisions often include
ethical issues, e.g. how genetic engineering should
be used, while simultaneously requiring a consen-
sus among more stakeholders and involved groups
in the decision process, which includes large uncer-
tainties. The issues are not solely scientific, legal,
political, or economic, but instead contain ele-
ments of each. In this mix of stakeholders, objec-
tives, criteria, and evidence, it is important to be
able to organize the arguments to communicate
their sources, reliability, and limitations. However,
the presentation of arguments, assumptions, and
their evaluations are typically highly static, taking
the forms of organizational reports, scientific
papers, journalistic articles, Web sites, and recently
weblogs.
Info, Comm & Ethics in Society (2006) 1: 27-36
© 2006 Troubador Publishing Ltd.
David J LePoire
Environmental Sciences Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, USA
Email: dlepoire@anl.gov
Many public issues, such as environmental actions, involve a large number of diverse stakeholders such as govern-
ments, corporations, organizations (e.g. NGOs), and concerned citizens. Discussions frequently become contentious as
the stakeholders defend their potentially conflicting goals with various assumptions, views, and expert testimony.
These issues also tend to involve a range of fields. For example, the disposition of nuclear waste includes issues of eco-
nomics, science, engineering, politics, and intergenerational justice, each with large uncertainties due to dependences
on indirect estimations and the long time periods involved. At the same time that these complex issues might increase
in number, due to applications of new technologies, tools are being developed on the Internet to enable flexible learn-
ing, visualization, collaborative conferencing, distributed computing, and meaning-based (semantic) context. These
tools might enable improved techniques for debating and discussing these complex issues. A technique that might facil-
itate orderly discussion of various arguments would include explicit recording and visualization of the evidence, its
assumptions and uncertainties, their relationships in constructing the overall argument, and the ways the evidence
needs to be generalized to support the argument. A simple argument visualization approach is explored based on a
combination of an argument logic framework and techniques for fusing generalized data that are similar to kriging in
spatial analysis. This approach is then applied to a recently contested risk analysis of nuclear waste disposition that was
debated in a peer-reviewed journal, involving concerns about uses of data, complex computational models, uncertain-
ty analysis, and expert judgment. The need for wider understanding of such complex issues might be addressed by a
convergence of techniques to facilitate greater understanding and the advanced Internet technologies to lower barriers
to their adoption.
Keywords: argument visualization, data fusion, semantic web, computational models
VOL 4 NO 1 JANUARY 2006 27
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