The Web is transforming rapidly from a Web of information to a Web of Opinions, where people feel the tendency to upload their viewpoints, ratings, and comments on any conceivable topic, via blogs, social media , websites, etc. The Web asphyxiates with opinions and arguments touching topics related to everything important or insignificant that is happenning around us. The plethora of opinions is currently populating the Web in a chaotic manner, yet opinions are not interlinked neither are uploaded as machine-interpretable data, and as a consequence, it is difficult for Web users to find arguments related to a certain topic, let alone evaluate them, or characterise them based on objective and subjective criteria.

DebateLab intends to pioneer research towards unlockng the potential of the new dialectical nature of the Web, relying on the coupling of mature fields namely Computational Argumentation, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, and the Semantic Web. The aim of DebateLab is dual purpose; a) conduct research towards devloping the required thoeoretical infrastructure for representing, mining and reasoning with online arguments, and b) develop and deliver a suite of tools and services (e-journalism domain) supporting the uptake and initial exploitation of the related technologies.

This research with pave the way for a new Web paradigm, a modern agora, where the different types of arguments and human deliberation can be amenable to machine-interpretable representation and algorithmic processing. The goal is to exploit the developments made in the Argument Web with respect to argument modelling, annotation, and visualization, but will further extend them to cover the requirements of Web dialogues. The DebateLab project is designed to deal with real arguments, extracted from existing sources and corpora. The field of online journalism possesses a repertoire of desirable features that constitute it suitable testbed of the vision towards a more argumentation-oriented Web.