Modeling claim-making process in democratic deliberation

Online deliberation is a promising venue for rational-critical discourse in public spheres and has the potential to support participatory decision-making and collective intelligence. With regard to public issues, deliberation is characterized by comparing and integrating different positions through claim-making, and generating collective judgments. In this paper, we examine the claim-making process and propose a conceptual model to manage the knowledge entities (claims, issues, facts, etc.) in claim-making and their relationships. Extending prior works in argumentation models and issue-based information systems, our model is especially capable of depicting the formation and evolvement of collective judgments in deliberation context.