Contested Collective Intelligence (CCI)

CCI= contested collective intelligence
CI= collective intelligence
CSCW= computer supported cooperative work
Sensemaking= applied research field
HCI= human-computer research
IBIS= Internet-Based Information System*
CCI is a distinctly specific dimension of collective intelligence,  a significant organizational and learning CI.

CI leaves an activity trace of users.  We are most familiar with the traces tracked for views, purchases, ratings and comments. Authors DeLiddo and Buckingham Shum make a case for defining unconscious traces versus conscious traces as corresponding with low level or higher order cognitions.  Sensemaking may be scaffolded by using CI to view the process and the products, as well as respond to new data by supplying "plausible narratives".

Klein, et al.

“By sensemaking, modern researchers seem to mean
something different from creativity, comprehension,
curiosity, mental modeling, explanation, or situational
awareness, although all these factors or phenomena can
be involved in or related to sensemaking. Sensemaking
is a motivated, continuous effort to understand
connections (which can be among people, places, and
events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act
effectively. […] A frame functions as a hypothesis
about the connections among data.”

Karl Weick says sensemaking is  “the making of sense”, that is, giving form to interpretations (cf.
the specific focus on sensemaking representations by Russell, et al.).
Weick proposes that:

“Sensemaking is about such things as placement of
items into frameworks, comprehending, redressing
surprise, constructing meaning, interacting in pursuit of
mutual understanding, and patterning.” (Weick,p.6)

Weick further argues that sensemaking is always social and not purely a cognitive data-driven procedure.

“The point we want to make here is that sensemaking is
about plausibility, coherence, and reasonableness.
Sensemaking is about accounts that are socially
acceptable and credible. […] It would be nice if these
accounts were also accurate. But in an equivocal,
postmodern world, infused with the politics of
interpretation and conflicting interests and inhabited by
people with multiple shifting identities, an obsession
with accuracy seems fruitless, and not of much practical
help, either.” ( p.61)

Research in cognition and representation of sense reviewHis argument, echoed by extensive research  Scaife and Rogers),
The process of externalization is the prompt that begins understanding and thus making sense--the drawings, codes, verbal sharings.


SBS and De Liddo propose an initial set of high-level functional requirements for the ideal CCI platform:
• A CCI platform builds collective awareness of contested knowledge;
• A CCI platform builds collective understanding of the nature of agreements and disagreements;
• A CCI platform builds collective understanding of ways to resolve disagreements.
Their approach uses a human annotationcode, concluding that  the ""hand curation' og interpretive layers will remain central." (DeLiddo, Buckingham Shum, 2010)



COHERE  intersection of web annotation (e.g. Diigo; Sidewiki), social bookmarking (e.g. Delicious), and mindmapping (e.g. MindMeister; Bubbl), using data feeds and an API to expose content to other services.
Users add to the Cohere system, in private,group or public spaces. They may annotate textual web
resources with clips (highlighted text fragments ofinterest), which are optionally connected to one or more ideas (displayed as margin notes explaining the significance of clips). Ideas may be optionally classified by inventing or reusing a type (e.g. as a Problem, Opinion,
Data, Theory, Prediction). Users may also connect ideas by inventing or reusing free-text expressions that capture the nature of the relationship, but these are also classified as broadly positive/neutral/negative, making them machine processable without language technology. The connections can be visualized as semantic maps (trees or networks), which can be filtered by connection-type, keywords, users and groups.

 Cohere allows userto mark up and comment web docs and add their own ideas to the mix.  It can be used to classify annotations and to show semantic connections between annotations.  When making comments, users can cite the specific comments on which they wish to comment or connect. 

Making connections between ideas and understandings is one of Cohere's main functionalities.  A triple node-link-node represents each semantic connection. The authors of each node can be different, and annotations can connect across different web sites.   Cohere, Collaboratorium (Klein 2008) and Debategraph (debategraph.org) are mature IBIS-based tools.

*IBIS-a system for the semantic integration of heterogeneous data sources, which adopts innovative and state-of-the-art solutions to deal with all aspects of a complex data-integration environment, including query answering under integrity constraints and limitations on source
access. IBIS is based on the global-as-view approach, using a relational mediated schema to query the data at the sources. Sources are wrapped so as to provide a relational view on them. A key issue is that the system allows the specification of integrity constraints (modeling constraints in the domain of interest) in the global schema. Since sources are autonomous, the extracted data in general do not satisfy the constraints. IBIS adapts and integrates the data extracted from the sources making use of the constraints in the global schema, so as to answer queries at best with the information available. IBIS deals with limitations in accessing data sources, and exploits techniques developed for querying sources with access limitations in order to retrieve the maximum set of answers. In particular, it may use integrity constraints available on the sources to improve the efficiency of the extraction process.  (Cal`ı1et al.)

Cohere, which serves as our working prototype of the CCI concept, now being
deployed in several communities of inquiry, including Climate Change analysis and the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement. In contrast to most semantic
web applications, the ontology of node and link classes is user-extensible, addressing the worldview requirement. The option to access Cohere through a Mozilla web browser
extension addresses the interpretation requirement that readers should be able to access the target of an annotation, by placing them in a sidebar ‘margin’ of the page.
Embedding Cohere as a web browser toolbar+sidebar also makes it ready to hand during any online activity. Cohere does not currently satisfy the third proposed requirement of an ideal CCI platform, namely, to help resolve dilemmas. One approach would be integration with, for instance, group decision-support systems and simulations, depending on the problem domain and willingness of users to engage with such tools. Research on Collaboratorium (Klein 2008) has been exploring climate change simulations. (DeLiddo, Buckingham Shum, 2010)

Reference
•Buckingham Shum, S. (2008). Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation. 2nd International Conference on Computational Models of Argument, 28-30 May 2008,
Toulouse. IOS Press: Amsterdam.
•Buckingham Shum, S. and Hammond, N. (1994) Argumentation-Based Design Rationale: What Use at What Cost? International Journal of Human-Computer
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•Buckingham Shum, S., Maclean, A., Bellotti, V. M., and Hammond, N. V. (1997). Graphical
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•Buckingham Shum, S., Selvin, A., Sierhuis, M., Conklin, J., Haley, C. and Nuseibeh, B. (2006a).
Hypermedia Support for Argumentation-Based Rationale: 15 Years on from gIBIS and QOC. In:
Rationale Management in Software Engineering (Eds.) A.H. Dutoit, R. McCall, I. Mistrik, and B. Paech. Springer-Verlag: Berlin
•De Liddo, Anna and Buckingham Shum, Simon (2010). Cohere: A prototype for contested collective
intelligence. In: ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2010) - Workshop: Collective
Intelligence In Organizations - Toward a Research Agenda, February 6-10, 2010, Savannah, Georgia, USA.
•De Liddo, Anna and Buckingham Shum, Simon (2010). Cohere: A prototype for contested collective
intelligence. In: ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2010) - Workshop: Collective
Intelligence In Organizations - Toward a Research Agenda, February 6-10, 2010, Savannah, Georgia, USA.
•Engelbart, D.C. (1963). A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect, in Vistas in Information Handling, P. Howerton and Weeks, Editors. 1963, Spartan Books: Washington, DC:
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•Klein, G., Moon, B. and Hoffman, R.F. (2006). Making sense of sensemaking 1: Alternative
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•Klein, M. and Iandoli, L. (2008). Supporting Collaborative Deliberation Using a Large-Scale
Argumentation System: The MIT Collaboratorium. Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing: Conference on Online Deliberation (DIAC- 2008/OD2008).
•Weick, K.E., Sensemaking in Organizations. 1995, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
•Russell, D.M., Stefik, M.J., Pirolli, P., & Card, S.K. (1993). The cost structure of sensemaking.
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•Rittel, H.W.J., Second Generation Design Methods. Interview in: Design Methods Group 5th Anniversary Report: DMG Occasional Paper, 1972. 1: p. 5-10. Reprinted in: Developments in Design Methodology, N. Cross (Ed.), 1984, pp. 317-327, J. Wiley & Sons: Chichester.

•IBIS: Semantic Data Integration at Work
Andrea Cal`ı1, Diego Calvanese1, Giuseppe De Giacomo1, Maurizio Lenzerini1, Paolo Naggar2, and Fabio Vernacotola2 1 Universit`a di Roma “La Sapienza” Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica via Salaria 113, I-00198 Roma, Italy lastname@dis.uniroma1.it 2 CM Sistemi via N. Sauro 1, I-00195 Roma, Italy firstname.lastname@gruppocm.it