News
20 July 2023
Gorgias Cloud was employed for a hands-on session during the 23rd European Agent Systems Summer School (EASSS 2023), which was held at the Faculty of Information Technology of Czech Technical University in Prague in the Czech Republic from July 17th till 21st, 2023. Specifically, in the second part of the tutorial given by Nikolaos Spanoudakis on "Preference-based argumentation in practice", 22 students had the possibility to do a hands on session to the Gorgias Cloud system to develop and test their own theories in a specific decision making problem. You can find the tutorial content here.
30 April 2023
The article "Explainable Argumentation as a Service" (authors: Spanoudakis N., Gligoris G., Koumi A., Kakas A.C.) was published by the Journal of Web Semantics (Q1 in software, IF 1.897). It reveals for the first time the technology and algorithms behind the Gorgias Cloud service. The service is hosted at the Technical University of Crete and supports university courses labs abroad, i.e. the University of Paris City (France) at post-graduate level and the University of Cyprus at pre-graduate level. It also supports students diploma thesis, master's thesis, and, PhD thesis in Greece and abroad.
The Gorgias Cloud service offers an integrated application development environment that facilitates the development of argumentation-based systems over the internet. Argumentation is offered as a service in a way that this allows application systems to remotely access the argumentation service and utilize the results of the argumentative computation. Moreover, the service results include the explanation of the decision in both human and machine-readable formats. The first is useful for allowing the application validation to be done by experts, while the second is useful for development. It appears that this is the first case where argumentation is offered to developers in such an open and distributed way.
5 September 2022
The Gorgias Cloud service now comes together with a human-readable explanation of the results of the user query. This capability along with some examples of real world systems developed with the Gorgias framework will be presented of 1st International Workshop on Argumentation for eXplainable AI (ArgXAI). Check out the Program here!
4 September 2022
The Gorgias Cloud system will be demonstrated at the 9th International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 2022) on September 14th-16th 2022 at Cardiff, UK. Check out the Program here!
3 April 2022
New API usage examples have been released to the Gorgias Cloud page. Specifically, we outline an example usage from Java and PHP. Find the usage examples at the Gorgias Cloud web page.
15 March 2022
The Gorgias Cloud service is upgraded. API for applications is now simpler, faster and isolated. Users can recover their lost passwords. The prolog command line has been disabled as the needed assertions are posted together with the gorgias prove request.
In a few days we will publish new API usage examples at the Gorgias Cloud web page.
20 April 2021
The Gorgias Cloud User Interface has been improved to allow to make Gorgias or Prolog queries easily. Moreover, it now keeps track of the type of the user files and the user can easily test different scenarios with one click.
Check out the updated Gorgias Cloud web page.
3 February 2021
The Gorgias Cloud service is now secure with SSL. Interested students or researchers can also find the API is now released so that they can use Gorgias as a Service for their applications.
Check out the updated Gorgias Cloud web page.
12 November 2020
Our paper with title "WebGorgiasB-Argumentation For All" will be presented as a full paper at the 13th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2021), which will take place at February 4-6 as an online event.
This paper proposes the use of a web-based authoring tool for the development of applications of argumentation. It focuses on aiding people that have little, or no knowledge of logic programming, or of an argumentation framework, to develop argumentation-based decision policies. To achieve this, it proposes an implementation of the table formalism that has recently been proposed in the literature. The proposed implementation contains original features that were evaluated by experts in web-application development, students and experts in argumentation. The main feature of the proposed system is the ability to define a default preferred option in a given scenario, thus, allowing for other options to be used in further refinements of the scenario. We followed a user-centered development process using the think aloud protocol. We evaluated the usability of the system with the System Usability Scale, validating our hypothesis that even naive users can employ it to define their decision policies.
Check out the conference schedule here, or, download the preprint here.
6 August 2020
Gorgias moves to the cloud following the thesis of Georgios Gligoris with title "Argumentation and reasoning on the computational cloud".
The current trend in today’s digital era is to provide computing services to the end users via the world-wide web, so that the connected user has full and easy access from everywhere, both to the most up-to-date versions of the software, but in many cases also to the user’s own files. This thesis attempts the migration of Gorgias, a decision-making tool based on argumentation and reasoning, to the computational cloud. With the main idea of connecting programs to the Prolog engine via the web, at the completion of this thesis an integrated environment was developed on the computational cloud. Through the implemented platform, the user has the ability to create project folders, save, edit and download files locally. Additionally, using the application panel, the user interacts and manages the Prolog engine and the Gorgias tool and asks questions, which, based on the files and rules uploaded by the user and after a reasoning process, lead to answers. The application has been developed with state-of-the-art technologies in the domain of web application development. The online service is implemented using Java’s Spring boot framework, while for the user’s interface the Angular 7 framework has been chosen, both of which, together with the RxJS library, provide a complete user experience. For the data storage needs, a relational database system was used and finally the container’s technology was selected for the application’s installation with the assistance of the Docker platform. Core of the application is, of course, the Prolog engine and consequently, the Gorgias tool, whose libraries are used extensively in it. As a result of this thesis, the application is available online, providing a communication channel with the Prolog engine and offering to the user a variety of features.
Access the thesis of Georgios here...
30 March 2020
Our paper with title "Argumentation For All" has been presented at the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC ’20).
This paper proposes the use of a web-based system for the development of applications of argumentation. It focuses on bringing the capability to develop decision policies based on argumentation to people that have little or no knowledge of logic programming or of an argumentation framework. To achieve this, it presents an implementation of the table formalism that has recently been put forward by previous work. Our system was evaluated using the think aloud protocol from the early stages of development.
You can watch the presentation video here, access the paper here, or, download the preprint here.
13 December 2019
A paper on the web version of Gorgias-B, promising simpler HMI and richer user experience is to be presented as a poster and will be included in the proceedings of the 35th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing, Brno, Czech Republic, March 30-April 3, 2020
Visit the conference web site...
19 July 2019
A web-based version of the Gorgias-B authoring tool is launched as the result of the thesis of Konstantinos Kostis with title "Web-based decision policy definition and simulation application for the Gorgias argumentation framework".
This thesis implements a web-based decision policy denition and simulation application for the Gorgias argumentation framework. The originality of this application lies in the use of state of the art web technologies alongside with Gorgias source code, which are combined together to deliver a user friendly and agile environment. Moreover, the application utilizes the majority of the Gorgias-B features and the SoDA methodology and tries to hide their complexity, so that users can focus on adding the scenarios and its preferences intuitively. Furthermore, the application completely hides the argument definition process by creating default object level arguments and by implementing a custom scenario view as a table representation, having scenarios as rows and the available options for each scenario as columns. For the front-end framework, in order to create the relevant HTML pages as well as navigation and basic functionality, the Angular 7 Typescript framework is selected for its robustness and the heavy amount of features that it offers. The cutting-edge Java Spring-Boot framework was selected as back-end framework, due to its capabilities which offer a very secure and fast server implementation which responds to the needs of every developer who wants to deploy applications to the cloud. Additionally, asynchronous scheduling technologies were used on the server, RESTful Web Services for access to the functionality from the client application, as well as NoSQL database technologies for storing and analyzing user's data. Finally, in order to have a more accurate picture of the results and the functionality of the developed application, evaluation with real users took place in two stages; one after the system design and the other after the system's implementation. During the first stage, the think aloud evaluation protocol was used, showing to users the paper prototypes created at the design process. At the latter stage, users were asked to use the developed application and interact with it. Results from both evaluation stages were taken into serious consideration and have been analyzed. Most of them have been implemented in the final version of this thesis application. After implementation, the same users were asked again and their feedback was very positive. In conclusion, through the use of the system, concerns and needs have been raised, which can be covered in a future version of the application.
Access the thesis of Kostis here...
1 March 2019
The Argument Theory start-up company is launched in France to exploit the potential of the Gorgias framework for commercial applications.
Visit its web site...
6 December 2018
Our paper with title "Gorgias: Applying Argumentation" has been published in the Journal "Argument & Computation", vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 55-81.
This paper presents the past and present efforts of developing real-life applications of argumentation with the Gorgias preference-based structured argumentation framework of Logic Programming with Priorities. Since its free availability on the web in 2003, the Gorgias system has been used by different groups in a variety of real-life applications in areas such as medical support, network security, business computing, ambient intelligence and, recently, in the area of cognitive personal assistants. We briefly review the Gorgias framework and its past applications and present an emerging general methodological approach for developing “decision making” applications of argumentation. This approach allows the development of real world applications directly from their high-level requirements expressed in the language of the application without the need for familiarity with the underlying technical details of argumentation. A new tool, called Gorgias-B, supports this high-level development of applications and automatically generates the underlying argumentation theory in Gorgias code. The paper also reports on ongoing real-life applications in two domains: an eye-clinic assistant for first level support, and systems for patient data access and data sharing agreements according to the relevant legislation and contracts or policies of the several stakeholders involved. The proposed approach is quite general for this type of applications of argumentation and, thus, it can be used with any preference-based argumentation framework.
Find the paper by following this link.
11 July 2017
A new Gorgias-B version (1.4.5) has been released:
- Fixes a bug with file save in Linux.
17 May 2017
A new Gorgias-B version (1.4.4) has been released:
- Allows the use of the \== SWI-prolog operator (system predicate for not equal numbers) in the scenarios conditions.
- Faster load/save/execute operations.
- A number of bug fixes.
17 March 2017
A new Gorgias-B version (1.4.2) has been released:
- New menu structure. Options and their arguments have their own menu separated from the menu about knowledge (including defeasible and non-defeasible knowledge, along with arguments for beliefs).
- allows to argue for beliefs (menu Edit -> Arguments for Beliefs). Includes an updated tweety example.
- in the scenario editor along with the button for resolving conflicts there is another for returning to more simple scenarios. Thus, the user no longer needs to interact with the level combobox - however it remains there for experienced users.
- There is a script for running Gorgias-B (runGorgias.bat) in windows, another for launching Gorgias-B along with a free tree editing software to assist the developer with defining the specific contexts (runGorgiasWithTreeEditor.bat) again in Windows, and,
- A script for running Gorgias-B in Linux (runGorgias.sh)
- Also fixed a bug that prevented to show in the execution panel negations of beliefs.
15 March 2017
Gorgias-B has been used to model the Cyprus legislation regarding medical data access policy. Moreover, a web application (MEDICA) has been developed that allows medical personel to search access rights on-line. The results of this application will be presented at the 30th International Conference on Industrial, Engineering & Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA/AIE 2017) and its Special Track on Applications of Argumentation (APPARG2017) in Arras, France. The conference will take place from 27-30 June 2017.
22 February 2017
A new Gorgias-B version (1.4.1) has been released:
- allows to insert arguments for beliefs (menu Edit -> Arguments for Beliefs). Includes the tweety example.
- in the scenario editor there is a button for resolving conflicts that is becoming active when you have conflicting models
- automatically inserts a default object-level rule without preconditions for every option you define
- if at some level N (with application scenario S) you insert a priority rule R1 for option A over option B with preconditions P and at the same level there is a priority rule R2 for option B over option A without preconditions, then Gorgias-B inserts automatically a priority rule R3 of option A over option B for the extended application scenario {S, P} without preconditions at level N+1
- launches a free tree editing software to assist the developer with defining the specific contexts
19 October 2016
A new Gorgias-B version (1.3.7) has been released:
- fixed a bug preventing many complements to be defined in the options view
7 October 2016
A new Gorgias-B version (1.3.6) has been released. It offers:
- fixed a bug preventing negative abducibles from showing at the options view
- removed auto-save before execution for much better performance. The trade-off is that now the user must remember to save his work before executing scenarios.
13 September 2016
A new Gorgias-B version (1.3.5) has been released. It offers:
- better execute view: no repeating arguments, no repeating lines within an argument
- better understanding of the situation of a general scenario, i.e. in the argue view, when the scenario has no predicates, the text "Generally among <option 1> and <option 2>..." appears insted of an empty line in the combo box
7 July 2016
A presentation of the SoDA methodology and Gorgias-B system will take place at COREDEMA 2016 in The Hague, Holland (September 13th-16th 2016). COREDEMA is the 2nd International Workshop on Conflict Resolution in Decision Making is held in conjunction with the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) 2016. The aim of COREDEMA is to bring together researchers from the contributing disciplines to share their perspectives on conflict resolution and the ways their theories and techniques are incorporated in the state-of-the-art in computer science and artificial intelligence. Furthermore, the workshop intends to establish new collaborations to advance the latest computational models for conflict resolution. We are looking forward to having the opportunity to present our system to you there and get your feedback!
9 June 2016
A demo of the The GorgiasB system will take place at COMMA 2016 in Potsdam, Germany (September 13th-16th 2016). The aim of the COMMA conference is to bring together researchers interested in computational models of argument and the representation of argumentation structures in natural language texts, including the problem of automatically discovering argumentation in text or speech. We are looking forward to having the opportunity to present our system to you there and get your feedback!
8 June 2016
The GorgiasB system will be presented during the poster sessions of the ECAI 2016 in the Hague, Holland (29 August - 2 September 2016). The biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) is Europe�s premier venue for presenting scientific results in AI. Supported by the European Coordinating Committee for AI (ECCAI), the ECAI conference provides an opportunity for researchers to present and hear about the very best research in contemporary AI. We are looking forward to having the opportunity to present our system to you there and get your feedback!
13 May 2016
Our extended abstract titled "Gorgias-B: Argumentation in Practice" has been selected for presentation at the Cardiff Argumentation Forum (CAF 2016). CAF is an open forum to anyone working or interested in argumentation and reasoning under uncertainty. Participants will be invited to give brief presentations, followed by question sessions intended to stimulate discussions. The event is organised by Federico Cerutti (School of Computer Science & Informatis at Cardiff University) and Francesca Toni (Department of Computing at Imperial College London). It will take place at Cardiff, UK, 06-07 July 2016. We will present the Gorgias-B system and look forward to your feedback.