Crafting an Environment for Collaborative Reasoning (IUI-2009)

Crafting an Environment for Collaborative Reasoning (IUI-2009)

By: Susanne Hupfer, Steven Ross, Jamie Rasmussen, James Christensen, Daniel Gruen, and John Patterson

Summary:
Many problems in the world today are very challenging because they require many diverse fields of expertise and require sophisticated reasoning that is beyond the capacity of just one person. These problems tend to need the effort and knowledge of many different people from many different fields to find an acceptable solution to them. Many times these problems are very complex and have changeable situations. This is where the term “Sensemaking” comes into play. It is defined as the motivated continuous effort to understand connections (among people, places and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively. There are many different knowledge sources (wikis etc) that help to solve these problems by sharing information, but these different tools are still inadequate to solve the problems individually and without the proper use. Many of the problems may not even have a well defined solution of ending point. The goal of this paper was to develop an intelligent interface and infrastructure that would be able to support people in gathering information, analyzing it, and making decisions based off of it. Some important concepts are: awareness (knowing who is working on what) and expertise location (where relevant experts are located). The main important aspects of a Collaborative reasoning environment are “Collaboration, Semantics and Adaptability.” Collaboration is defined as working together to get information. Semantics is making sure the information gathered about situations is fully understood by all parties (people, places, and events etc.). Adaptability allows people to adapt to the problems that have an ever ending nature.

This led the users to develop the CRAFT (Collaborative Reasoning and Analysis Framework and Toolkit) which uses the above ideas to establish a way for better collaborative reasoning, information sharing and decision making. This toolkit uses nodes on a graph to represent people, groups, locations activities, questions, hypotheses and evidence. This allows a centralized collection of data. This study showed that the toolkit was a good way for users to communicate information.

Discussion:
I thought that this paper was rather interesting and well written. I liked the way it first described everything and then tied it together. This made it easier to tie together all of the pieces to understand the whole concept of what they were discussing. I like the concept of being able to share information and collaborate with a group of people through a centralized data structure such as a graph. This could definitely be evolved to be used in a working scenario.