Complementing our theoretical work, is our commitment to the practical applications of digital tools in work where there is a particualr challenge in managing the connections between information, ideas and arguments about their significance. The themes below provide an application-oriented way into our work.

Design Rationale & Meeting Capture: We are leaders in Argumentation-Based Design Rationale, an approach to collaborative modelling of design deliberations as networks of design issues, options and arguments. This has expanded to the capture and conceptual indexing of audio-visual meeting records. more >>>

e-Learning & Open Educational Resources: Central to the mission of the Open University is the challenge of engaging students with material, and with each other, over time and space. Our work on hypermedia representations of discourse can scaffold the building of different sorts of knowledge map for personal and collaborative reflection. A major focus at present is on sensemaking and collaboration tools for self-organising communities of students and educators accessing Open Educational Resources. more >>>

Emergency search and rescue: A tool like Compendium enables a team's deliberations to be mapped in real time to manage information sources, competing interpretations, arguments and decisions, particularly in time-pressured scenarios such as emergency rescue where harnessing collective intelligence is a priority. This overlaps with work in e-Science (e.g. NASA missions) and International Development scenarios (e.g. natural disasters). more >>>

e-Science: Infrastructures for publishing, interpreting and contesting research results that exploit the internet, from web-based conversational peer review in e-journals, to collaborative semantics for argumentation. more >>>

International Development: We have an interest in the distinctive demands of technology support in international development contexts, and are working with a variety of partners to better understand the potential of our tools. more >>>

Participatory Urban Planning: Research led by Anna De Liddo is investigating the requirements for project memory tools to support participatory models of urban planning, engaging all stakeholders. more >>>

Pragmatic Web: A conception of new tools, literacies and conceptual foundations, emerging from the research programme on this site. Has synergies with new conceptions of the "Pragmatic Web", which foregrounds the centrality of context in web-mediated meaning negotiation between diverse stakeholders and perspectives. more >>>

Professional Knowledge-Sharing via Storybases: Research led by Joanna Kwiat is exploring theories of narrative as the basis for a flexible story metadata scheme [Storymaking Project]. This is being evaluated in the context of a web story database for knowledge sharing and annotation amongst health professionals. more >>>

Public Discourse: We, and others, are applying our work to improve the quality of public discourse on topical matters. more >>>

Web Usability: With the emergence of the Web as a mainstream infrastructure around 1995, there was a lot of reinventing the usability wheel, as website enthusiasts made all the same mistakes that hypertext researchers had been reporting in the preceding decade. KMi hosted a workshop in 1996 on "The Missing Link" between hypermedia usability research and the Web, which became a special journal issue, fully online. more >>>