Opinion Aggregation and Conflict Resolution in E-Government Platforms

Abstract

This chapter presents an account of recent advances in the development of a novel e-participation framework which integrates social networks, intelligent information retrieval and argumentation techniques. We discuss a novel conceptualization for Electronic Empowerment Participation (E2P), a radically new perspective on e-Participation, where collective thinking patterns can be identified under the generic form of “arguments”, being contrasted automatically and enhancing thus the abilities of the different stakeholders to engage in creative participatory processes. The underlying machinery that makes E2P possible is given by agreement technologies, a new metaphor that integrates several aspects from database theory, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems and social infrastructures. A core component in this conceptualization is an underlying argument-based approach, which allows to mine opinions from text-based information items based on incrementally generated topics.