The AREN project (in French, ARgumentation Et Numérique ; argumentation and digital) aims to develop a digital platform for online debates that promotes the development of people' argumentative skills and their critical thinking, through a citizenship education perspective. This platform allows the simultaneous participation of a large number of people in a debate, offers time to build arguments and allows to keep track of exchanges, support for reflective work.

The project has two research components :

• A didactic component consists of experimenting with the platform in order to assess its impact and suggest changes.
• An artificial intelligence (AI) component focuses on the automatic processing of natural language and aims to develop and evaluate an AI service for thematic classification of student interventions, facilitating their analysis and the preparation of the reflective synthesis.

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

• Java Web server (Test and work on Apache-Tomcat 7.0.80+)
• Maven
• PostgreSQL

Install and configure PostgreSQL specificaly to your OS, check the documentation, to ensure having a secure and remote accessible database.

Create the user that will manage your database. Repalce [db_user] and [db_password] by your own choices. CREATE USER [db_user] WITH PASSWORD '[db_password]'; Create the database, Replace [db_name] by your own choice. CREATE DATABASE [db_name] OWNER [db_user];

Download and extract the sources in the repository of your choice.

Go to the source folder and run mvn clean install. A target folder is then created with the aren.war file inside.

Deploy the aren.war on the Java WebSever of your choice [Tomcat 7 tested and functional].

On the first launch, the application will ask you for DB creentials. This infomation will be stored in ${catalina.base}/conf/aren.properties, so make sure this file is writable by the Tomcat process.

• Dump your SQL data with pg_dump -h [db_server] -p [db_port] -a -U [db_user] [db_name] > dump.sql
• Drop the DB with dropdb -U [db_user] [db_name]
• Recreate the database with createdb -U [db_user] [db_name]
• Start the application like for a first deployment.
• Open the application in your browser and set the DB credentials as asked. Do not pursue much further on the browser !
  • The database schema is now created.
• Execute the following SQL code ALTER TABLE documents ADD COLUMN tags text; ALTER TABLE documents ADD COLUMN proposed_tags text;
• Import your old datas with psql -h [db_server] -p [db_port] -a -U [db_user] -f dump.sql [db_name] and correct the errors.
  • The notifications were not being remove, so some foreign key error may arrive, they can be ignored.
• Execute the following SQL code ALTER TABLE documents DROP COLUMN tags; ALTER TABLE documents DROP COLUMN proposed_tags;
• Update the database serials with those lines :

ALTER TABLE debates ADD reformulation_mandatory BOOLEAN;
UPDATE debates SET reformulation_mandatory = TRUE;
SELECT setval('comments_id_seq', (SELECT MAX(id) FROM comments));
SELECT setval('configurations_id_seq', (SELECT MAX(id) FROM configurations));
SELECT setval('debates_id_seq', (SELECT MAX(id) FROM debates));
SELECT setval('documents_id_seq', (SELECT MAX(id) FROM documents));
SELECT setval('institutions_id_seq', (SELECT MAX(id) FROM institutions));
SELECT setval('notifications_id_seq', (SELECT MAX(id) FROM notifications));
SELECT setval('teams_id_seq', (SELECT MAX(id)  FROM teams));
SELECT setval('users_id_seq', (SELECT MAX(id)  FROM users));

• Finish the configuration in your browser.

The web interface is shiped with an useful help button. Use it if you have any issues. The REST API documentation can be found here. You can access the openapi desc directly through the application with the url /ws/openapi.[json|yaml]

@TODO

• Maven - Dependency Management
• Vue.js - Web framework used
• Vue-i18n - Internationalization tool for Vue.js
• Vue-router - Single Page Website tool for Vue.js
• http-vue-loader - Async .vue file loading for Vue.js
• Materialize - CSS framwork used
• D3.js - Visualization tool

@TODO

We use SemVer for versioning.

• Noémie-Fleur Sandillon-Rezer - Initial work, full-stack of v1.0.0 - [email protected]
• Florent Descroix - Complete rework, full stack since v3.0.0 - [email protected]

See also the list of CONTRIBUTORS who participated in this project.

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Official website