Building and supporting shared understanding in collaborative problem-solving

Over the last decade the level of interest in the field of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) has grown enormously to support various collaborative activities. Basically they all support argumentation in one or the other way. While many environments do support the process of bringing people into collaboration, the participants often fail to understand each others' activities, knowledge, beliefs or communicating contextual information. We propose an interface for the interactive construction of a Bayesian belief network for not only inferencing in uncertainty, but also for enhancing the deliberation of argumentation, and visualizing the insights of collaborative discourse to build and support shared understanding.