The IMPACT project aims to develop web applications to support the use of arguments in policy consultations and deliberations. More specifically, the goal is to provide an argumentation toolbox which makes it easier to identify stakeholder interests and values, collect policy proposals and arguments about the pros and cons of these proposals, reconstruct arguments from natural language texts, analyse the legal effects of alternative policies in particular cases, and visualise and keep track of complex networks of arguments as well as critique arguments.

The Policy Argumentation Toolbox being developed will consist of:

1. An argument reconstruction tool, which supports policy analysts with the task of finding and modeling relevant arguments in large numbers of articles and comments in natural language on the Web. The tool will be an interactive rich Internet application which uses a library of argumentation schemes to support the manual reconstruction of arguments.

2. A policy modelling and analysis tool with an inference engine to simulate and analyse the consequences of a proposed policy in particular cases, including hypothetical cases. The tool will be able to produce a clear visualisation of its reasoning, so that citizens can understand not only the effects the policy would have on their own lives, but also understand why. The tool will enable citizens and other actors in the policy development process to compare the effects of different policy proposals.

3. A structured consultation tool, an advanced, intelligent polling and survey tool. The questions in the surveys are generated using argumentation schemes from a model of the facts and actions relevant to the policy issue under consideration. By completing the resulting interactive form, users' responses can be assimilated into this model to indicate points of agreement and disagreement. The results of the surveys can be interpreted as critiques of existing arguments and they can be used as a basis for revising arguments about the policy.

4. An argument analysis, tracking and visualisation tool that enables users to navigate through arguments contained in relevant consultation and policy documents, and to make sense of these arguments. The tool will display arguments for and against policy-proposals as Web-browsable argument maps. Users will be able to browse these argument maps and follow links from these visual summaries of the arguments back to the original policy documents, thereby supporting a document-centric approach to mapping the arguments in policy debate.

These tools will be designed and implemented so as to be usable together, as part of an integrated argumentation toolbox, which can be installed upon and used with a variety of existing popular Open Source content management systems (CMS) as they are used in e-participation initiatives throughout Europe. Further information about these areas of argumentation technology is shared and discussed on the Policy Argumentation Network.
A more detailed description of each tool is available on the website of the IMPACT project.