The Argument Interchange Format

While significant progress has been made in understanding the theoretical properties of different argumentation logics and in specifying argumentation dialogues, there remain major barriers to the development and practical deployment of argumentation systems. One of these barriers is the lack of a shared, agreed notation or “interchange format” for argumentation and arguments. In the last years a number of different argument mark-up languages have been proposed in the context of tools developed for argument visualisation and construction (see [10] for a review). Thus, for example, the Assurance and Safety Case Environment (ASCE)1 is a graphical and narrative authoring tool for developing and managing assurance cases, safety cases and other complex project documentation. ASCE relies on an ontology for arguments about safety based on claims, arguments and evidence [8]. Another mark-up language was developed for Compendium,2 a semantic hypertext concept mapping tool. The Compendium argument ontology enables construction of networks, in which nodes represent issues, positions and arguments. The analysis and study of human argument has also prompted the development of specialised argument mark-up languages and tools. Two particularly relevant developments in this direction are ClaiMaker [5] and AML [18]. ClaiMaker and related technologies [5] provide a set of tools for individuals or distributed communities to publish and contest ideas and arguments, as is required in contested domains such as research literatures, intelligence analysis, or public debate. This system is based on the ScholOnto ontology [4], which can express a number of basic reasoning