D-BAS

D-BAS is a novel approach to online argumentation. It avoids the pitfalls of unstructured systems such as asynchronous threaded discussions and it is usable by any participant without training while still supporting the full complexity of real-world argumentation. The key idea is to let users exchange arguments with each other in the form of a time-shifted dialog where arguments are presented and acted upon one-at-a-time.

Currently, the main development-process happens in our GitLab instance, but you can open issues here, submit pull requests etc. and we will coordinate your contributions.

You can play around with the latest release of D-BAS on https://dbas.cs.hhu.de/.

Setup for Linux / macOS

Ensure that the following tools are installed:

• Python >= 3.6
• Docker
• Docker Compose

Documentation

Find the latest documentation here: https://dbas.cs.hhu.de/docs/

Environment Variables

D-BAS needs some environment variables to be set for running properly. By default those variables which are required by D-BAS are stored in .env. To get further details on which variables are set or how they can be added/changed take a look at the documentation here.

Compose-Files

All docker-compose.<service>.yml-files had been moved to the /docker/compose folder. Since development.yml is now used for production-mode each <service>.yml-file must be saved separately. To add a service to production-mode the corresponding <service>.yml-file must be defined in /docker/compose. Then the code must be added to docker-compose.yml.

Run D-BAS

Then follow these steps:

If you want to run D-BAS locally in dev-mode:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up

If you want to include the notification service as well as elastic search:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml -f docker/compose/notifications.yml -f docker/compose/search.yml up

After this you can hit http://localhost:4284 for D-BAS.

If your container stucks during the first start up, please install D-BAS manually (while the container is running) via:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml exec web make

Afterwards everything should be fine.

Production Mode

Currently, the default Compose file is being used by us with pre-built images. We are working on this to make it accessible for everyone.

Start it with:

docker-compose up

Set Ports for your environment in .env or provide it during runtime to your CI/CD platform. Find the variables in .env.

Maintainers

• Christian Meter
• Björn Ebbinghaus

Contributors

We thank all contributors of this project! In order of appearance:

• Alexander Schneider
• Marc Feger
• Markus Brenneis
• Jan Steimann

Former Contributors

Thanks to all former contributors! In order of appearance:

• Teresa Uebber (JS Graphs and Visualizations)

Former Maintainers

Thanks for maintaining the project and for your work! We appreciate your efforts 🎉 In order of appearance:

• Tobias Schröder (né Krauthoff)

Scientific Background

We published several papers on this work and on our software. Here is a selection of them:

• Various Efforts of Enhancing Real World Online Discussions
• D-BAS - A Dialog-Based Online Argumentation System
• Overview of our Publications

Citations

Cite this software with the BibTeX Scheme:

@inproceedings{hhucn2018,
  title={D-BAS-A Dialog-Based Online Argumentation System.},
  author={Krauthoff, Tobias and Meter, Christian and Baurmann, Michael and Betz, Gregor and Mauve, Martin},
  booktitle={COMMA},
  pages={325--336},
  year={2018}
}

License

Copyright (c) 2016 – 2018 Tobias Schröder (né Krauthoff), Christian Meter
Copyright (c) 2018 – today hhucn

Distributed under the MIT License