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Developed in the context of the Scholarly Ontologies project (or ScholOnto), ClaimSpotter is designed to support document sensemaking tasks: reading, highlighting areas of potential interest, making notes, looking for specific kinds of papers in the bibliography, and so forth. While researchers clearly do this all the time on paper, or with freetext annotations in various document viewers, the challenge was to support users in these tasks with our semantic tagging approach. ClaimSpotter's design aims to initiate and sustain a dialogue between annotators and the target document, via (i) content-based support for tagging, in the form of recommendations, and (ii) an interface displaying these recommendations overlaid on the text.

ScholOnto takes a hybrid, semiformal approach to add structure to freeform folksonomies:

1. As with folksonomies, tags remain unconstrained freetext strings, although users can choose to take care to reuse existing tags in order to increase the visibility of their tagging, or to discover new connections. In our context, however, tags may become phrases or even a sentence or two if they are used to express, for instance, a hypothesis, a prediction or a research result.
2. A critical difference is that tags may be linked not just to a URI, but to each other. We term a tag-relationship-tag triple a claim, that is, a meaningful connection being asserted between two ideas. A claim may also link from/to other claims, as the ideas grow in complexity. A claim is also directed: it has a source and a destination tag.
3. Tags are linked using a typology derived from argumentation and the most common moves made in research publications. Users select the relationship from a menu of predefined relationships (e.g. is consistent with, refutes, addresses, solves, improves on, is analogous to, uses/applies).
4. Tags may optionally be classified (e.g. problem, evidence, data, method, theory), but these are pragmatic, contextual roles, holding only in the context of a particular claim. Thus, in one context, a research result might be a problem, while, in another context, it might be an assumption.

This screencast introduces the main functionalities of ClaimSpotter.