Auton stands for Audited Trail Of Knowledge.
Auton is an experiment in collaborative reasoning. It touches the fields of Social Choice, Knowledge Representation, and Logic.
The idea is that the site will formally store claims and counterclaims and supporting claims and rebuttal and so forth, and make them publicly visible. We want to see if this will lead to a better quality of debate. Since it's an experiment, we can also experimentally change the rules to see what seems to give the best results.
The Auton project is the brainchild of Ron House and myself, Tom Breton
Auton grew out of Ron's and my frustration with Usenet debates that cover the same ground over and over and over and over.
I have coded and tested version 0.0, and we are testing it in a staging area. It's not really for public display yet, but the occasional visitor won't be a problem.
It is currently being hosted at www.tehom.com/Auton/top.html
We expect to rethink, redesign, and recode it before it is ready for publication, which will be v1.0
Tom Breton