Abstract

Decision making is a fundamental human activity. Most important decisions require careful analysis of the factors influencing a decision. Surprisingly, there has been little work on tools to capture and assess validity of a heterogeneous set of facts and claims that bear on a decision. Good decision making requires two components which are specializations of Semantic Web approaches:(i) sound argumentation about the factors involved and (ii) clear judgments about reliability of the information sources in which the argument is grounded. We describe TRELLIS, our vehicle for researching the problem and a tool supports making decisions that, as is often the case, must rest on possibly conflicting or unreliable information sources. We report on recent progress in collecting and classifying argumentation acts which occur in real arguments, and outline our ongoing work on extending how argumentation and decision making over heterogeneous sources can be supported. The system is available at http://trellis. semanticweb. org

Date

2003

Authors

Timothy Chklovski, Yolanda Gil, Varun Ratnakar, John Lee

Journal

Proceedings of the 2nd International Semantic Web Conference