Argdown Flare Export

Plugin for argdown.

Converts the internal representation of the debate to a tree-structure suitable for visualization as here.

The tree is constructed from the following rules:

1. all (topic) sections are children to the root node
2. arguments are added to the sections they belong to or the root node if they don't belong into any category
3. the statements in the debate are the terminal nodes and are added to their respective arguments or to the root node if they don't belong to any

Usage

Tests

There are some minimal tests in src/test.js that capture the rules given above. Run with npm run test $path_to_argdown, where $path_to_argdown is any .argdown file.

Executable

From src/ run node index.js path/to/argdown path/to/json, to read the .argdown file from path/to/argdown and write the resulting tree in json format to path/to/json. Both arguments can be omitted or replaced by '-' to use stdin/stdout. If only one of them is given this is assumed to be the input file.

You can use the test visualization in the vis/ directory to check the result. Drop the output json in the same directory and start a local http server (python -m http.server is an easy one or install the http-server npm module). vis/flare.html shows the whole tree, vis/flare-zoom.html only ever shows two levels, but you can click on the nodes to zoom around. They were taken from here and here and slightly modified to log some debug info to the console.

Plugin

To use just the plugin in a different application, import FlareExport from src/FlareExport.js and add it to your argdown app. The plugin depends on the JSONExport plugin from argdown-parser, so you need to run it after that one. After it ran, the data object has a new attribute data.flare that contains the tree as a JS object, which you can then use in your application.

Flare Tree

The flare data structure is a simple tree, every node has a name (given by the title of the original argdown data items), and children. The terminal nodes have a size instead of children. This is set to 1 for now, but it would be possible to make this a function of the argument structure. Additionally there a meta sub-object that saves the id, the type (statement, argument or section), section-type nodes also save their level in the section hierarchy, it's only used internally, though it might useful somewhere else as well.

In pseudo-code

Node:
    name
    children|size
    meta:
        id
        type
        [level]