Pacisco/Development/Future_Development

A parking place for ideas for future development.  The order is not significant.

Investigate the use of scoping warrants

Where the relationship of the grounds to the claim is very specific, the use of a global warrant may be difficult to formulate and inappropriate.  Should it be possible to designate a warrant as only having local applicability to the case it is used in?

Make Pacisco accessible

Currently as a prototype, no consideration has been given to accessibility of the web interface.  If it goes beyond prototype stage making it accessible would be a priority.

Database administrators’ control panel

To provide a real-time view of the database state and activity.  Housekeeping functions would be initiated from here.

Overview of the argumentation space

Provide a ‘dashboard’ containing statistics on the number of arguments in the database and their characteristics.  Perhaps some sort of connectivity network could be shown.

Improve input and display of ratings

Interpretation of the summated rating probabilities could be considerably improved by presenting the population size and other statistics about the range of opinions (median, mode, standard distribution, graphical display to show multi-modality etc.).  This would only be worth doing when the population of debaters (i.e. users) has become substantial.

Where, in the absence of evidence, a rating probability is generated out of ‘gut feeling’, a graphical device (e.g. slider bar, manipulable pie-chart, etc.) may improve reliability.

Make the URL of a claim easily available

To facilitate drawing other interested parties into a debate, it is possible to send someone a URL containing a query string that will open Pacisco at a particular claim.  This facility would provide easy (one click) generation of a URL, and perhaps its insertion into the system clip-board, ready to be pasted into Twitter or an email, blog, etc.

Computational Linguistic assistance in writing propositions

Writing good propositions in claims, grounds and warrants requires some skill.  The success of the whole enterprise depends on propositions being formulated correctly.  The requirement not to make use of deixis or anaphora requires the use of formal and stiff phrasing.  The use of the logical connectives may indicate that more than one atomic proposition is inappropriately included, or they may simply be used in a compound nominal.

Detecting these errors is not straightforward.  However, advances in computational linguistics and the wider availability of tools incorporating it may offer a solution.  The open-source grammar checker, After the Deadline or other tools as they are identified will be explored for their application to this problem.

Rewriting of claims

Currently it would be possible for a user to creat a new claim that better expresses an existing claim and then declare it equivalent.  The possibility of an easier way of doing this will be investigated.