Contributing to the Argument Interchange Format

The Argument Interchange Format, AIF, is an international effort to develop a representational mechanism for exchanging argument resources between research groups, tools, and domains using a semantically rich language.

The AIF is a description written largely in natural language. That description is then available as a number of different specifications in different languages (such as OWL-DL, RDF-S and SQL). Those specifications are in turn available for download as specific implementations.

The Spring 2012 version of the AIF is available as

• An OWL specification (with brief notes and full documentation)
• An RDF specification (with brief notes and full documentation)
• An SQL database definition (with summary and full documentation) missing links to be finished by end Mar 2012

History & Related Work

ARG:dundee has been contributing to the Argument Interchange Format since its inception. In 2005, a group of researchers met at an AgentLink colloquium in Budapest. The documents from that meeting were collected together online at x-opennet.org, a site that is sadly now defunct. The result of the work in Budapest was published as a draft description in 2006. Since then, a number of groups have published further work on the AIF (feel free to drop links to examples in the comments to this post), with ARG’s contributions to the debate focusing on an OWL-DL reification for the World Wide Argument Web published in Artificial Intelligence in collaboration with Iyad Rahwan and Fouad Zablith, and a preliminary characterisation of dialogue in the AIF published in COMMA-2008. Other work of which we are aware (as at June 2009) includes:

• Sanjay Modgil and Jarred McGinnis working on using the LCC for dialogue in AIF, with a paper at ArgMAS-2007
• Ioan Alfred Letia and Adrian Groza working on extending AIF for mapping, with a paper at ArgMAS-2008
• Stella Heras at Univesidad Politecnica de Valencia working on AIF and dialogue, with a paper at ArgMAS-2009
• A paper summarising recent work on AIF can be found in the book co-edited by Iyad Rahwan and Guillermo Simari.
• this lists needs updating

Older Versions

The first stable version of the AIF1 implementation was released as the following set:

• The Core AIF in RDF and OWL
• A variant of the above in OWL-DL
• An SQL database definition aif1db-sql

The relationships between these files and their current status is described in a Technical Report and a summary diagram.

Earlier than that, we said that: though AIF is still something of a moving target, it is settling down. Machine-readable versions of AIF are available

 

• • in RDF (as used in ArgDF) ArgOnt.rdf ArgOnt.rdfs
  • in OWL-DL (as used in Avicenna and Araucaria v4) araucaria4.owl