Argunet.org Website Review

By now, Argunet belongs to the senior citizens of the software realm. While it has grown quiet around this blog, behind the scenes, we were busy experimenting with a different technological approach to argument mapping. The result is a completely new software tool that we are very excited about. This post introduces Argdown to the Argunet community and explains why it has become our new tool of choice. We (Gregor Betz, Helen Bohse, Sebastian Cacean, David Schneider, and myself) started working on Argunet back in 2006 and published the more than 50.000 times, which is a lot, given the small number of argument mapping enthusiasts and the limited publicity of the But first and foremost, we developed Argunet because we needed such a tool in our own work. And overall it did its job well! We have used it for many different purposes, be it in philosophy seminars, in research projects, for reconstructing huge debates, or for the moderation of Over time, however, three problems emerged. By design and through the technology used, Argunet is a “monolithic” application: the swiss army knife of argument mapping. This makes it a comparatively large and complex software that is neither easy to use, application and uses the Eclipse application framework. Eclipse is known for its complexity and has continuously evolved over the years. Working on Argunet on our free time, we never could keep up, let alone extend Argunet with new features. Differences between operating systems only made matters worse and caused a lot of installation problems. frameworks. Other software can neither directly interact with Argunet nor can its data be read or written without extra export and import steps. Instead, Argunet tries to do everything “on its own”. Additionally, it is very complicated to extend the existing code base At some point we had to decide if we should rather invest a huge effort into practically rewriting Argunet, or if it made more sense to completely rethink our approach and start anew. We decided to do the latter.