SENSE4US · Data Insights for Policy Makers and Citizens

Making and implementing policy at any level of government is fraught with difficulty. The impact of decisions made are not always obvious at the time the policy is formulated or enacted, and any short-comings of the policy become known too late to change it. This is not due to a lack of information, it is due to the difficulty of finding and aggregating the right data out of the sea of information which characterises our modern world. Having once formulated a policy it is then impossible to make useful predictions around its likely impact and effectiveness. Policy specialists lack the resources and the methodology to be able to access most current data and are unable to take into account the views of citizens on policy issues expressed in real time through social network discussions. SENSE4US is creating an integrated package of utilities based on cutting-edge research that meets this need for tools and techniques to support information gathering, analysing and policy modelling in real time. Through close interaction with policy makers around Europe the project will validate results in complex policy-making settings and direct the research towards the support of more timely, more effective and better understood policy creation. The SENSE4US project will tackle these challenges of policy making and implementation, integrating the benefits of both quantitative open data sources and qualitative social media data. We will provide tools enabling policy makers to find and select relevant information; link and homogenise the data; model policy in terms of constraints and intent; validate the policy; discover and incorporate views from NGOs and public; predict social impact of policy; provide decision support; provide understandable visualisation. The ultimate objective of the SENSE4US project is to advance policy modelling and simulation, data analytics and social network discussion dynamics, providing economic and social benefits at all governmental levels across Europe.