Neil Benn – Research Profile

Neil J. L. Benn

My first degree is in Computer Science, which I obtained from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados (1997–2000). After a one-year stint as a secondary school teacher, I travelled to the United Kingdom to pursue a Masters degree in Software Engineering at the University of York (2001 - 2002). When this was successfully completed, I decided to pursue a PhD degree at the Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University (2002–2009). My PhD supervisors were Simon Buckingham Shum, John Domingue, and Clara Mancini.

My overall research interest is in investigating how information technology can enable people to make sense of competing and conflicting viewpoints as a way to foster more reasoned and reflective. More narrowly, to date I have focussed on the question of "How can information technology be used to support the analysis of debate—the scholarly claims and counterclaims—in academic domains?"

As a first step toward addressing this question, I have focussed on the ontological foundations of the information technology. Thus my main research contribution thus far has been the design of an ontology for representing debate in academic domains. The ontology defines the concepts for structured representation of debate and it defines rules for analysing these debate structures to detect interesting features of the debate in academic domains – features such as the main bodies of opinion. The ontology has been used to capture and analyse argument structures in two real-world debates: one within the domain of Artificial Intelligence and the other within the domain of Bioethics.

Keywords: Computational argument, debate mapping, argument analysis, ontology engineering, knowledge representation, scholarly hypermedia, knowledge organisation systems, philosophy of science

On computer-support argumentation

• Benn, Neil. 2010. Using the cDnS ontology as upper-level for a Scholarly Debate Ontology. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2010), Toronto, ed. A. Galton and R. Mizoguchi, pp. 359–372. IOS Press.
• Benn, Neil. 2009. Modelling Scholarly Debate: Conceptual Foundations for Knowledge Domain Analysis Technology. PhD Thesis, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. Available as: Technical Report KMI-09-04, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University. URL=http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-09-04.pdf.
• Benn, Neil, Simon Buckingham Shum, John Domingue, and Clara Mancini. 2008. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 2008), Toulouse, ed. P. Besnard, S. Doutre, and A. Hunter, pp. 61–72. IOS Press.
• Benn, Neil, Simon Buckingham Shum, and John Domingue. 2005. Integrating Scholarly Argumentation, Texts and Community: Towards an Ontology and Services. In working notes of the Fifth International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA 2005), Edinburgh, ed. C. Reed, F. Grasso, and R. Kibble. Available as: Technical Report KMI-05-5, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University. URL=http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-05-5.pdf.

On semantic web services

• Yu, Hong Q., Neil Benn, Stefan Dietze. Ronald Siebes, Carlos Pedrinaci, Dong Liu, Dave Lambert, and John Domingue. 2010. Two-staged approach for semantically annotating and brokering TV-related services. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2010), Miami, pp. 497–503. IEEE Computer Society.
• Dietze, Stefan, Neil Benn, John Domingue, Alex Conconi, and Fabio Cattaneo. 2009. Two-Fold Semantic Web Service Matchmaking—Applying Ontology Mapping for Service Discovery. In Proceedings of the Fourth Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2009), Shanghai, ed. A. Gomez-Perez, Y. Yu, and Y. Ding, pp. 246–260. Springer.
• Dietze, Stefan, Neil Benn, John Domingue, Alex Conconi, and Fabio Cattaneo. 2008. Interoperable Multimedia Metadata through Similarity-based Semantic Web Service Discovery. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT 2009), Graz, ed. T. Chua, Y. Kompatsiaris, B. Merialdo, W. Haas, G. Thallinger, W. Bailer, pp. 77–88. Springer.

Click here to email me.

Or you can write to me at:

Neil Benn
C/o Institute of Communication Studies
University of Leeds
LS2 9JT(Click to see on Google Maps)