Carneades is an argument mapping and evaluation application, with a graphical user interface, and a software library for building applications supporting various argumentation tasks.
The latest version of the Carneades, currently under development, is implemented in a functional style using Clojure and is thus portable to all platforms with a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
Carneades provides tools supporting a variety of argumentation tasks, including:
- argument construction from conceptual models (ontologies), defeasible rules and argumentation schemes
- argument evaluation, using proof burdens and standards and a model of the audience
- finding positions to support claims, using abduction
- argument mapping and visualization
- argument interchange in XML, using the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF)
The argument construction module uses resource-bounded heuristic strategies to search the space of arguments induced by a set of computational models of various argumentation schemes. Several heuristic search strategies are available, "out of the box". The system includes a simple API for extending the system with computational models of other argumentation schemes. Any number of argumentation schemes may be used together, making Carneades an open architecture for hybrid reasoning.
Development of Carneades has been funded in part by the ESTRELLA (IST-2004-027655) and IMPACT (IST-2009-247228) European research projects. Work on earlier version of the graphical user interface was funded in part by Google in 2008, as part of its Summer of Code program. The latest version of the graphical user interface, currently under development, was funded by a project with Douglas Walton from a grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Carneades is Open Source software licensed under the European Union Public License (EUPL v1.1), which is compatible with the GNU GPL (version 2), and the Eclipse Public License (verision 1.0), among others.