NUI Galway – UL Alliance First Annual ENGINEERING AND - ARAN ...

Policy Modeling meets Linked Open Data
Evangelos Kalampokis 1,2 , Nikos Loutas 1,2 , Sajin Kumar 1 , Konstantinos Tarabanis 2
1 Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NUI Galway
firstname.lastname@deri.org
2 Information Systems Lab, University of Macedonia, Greece
Abstract
Policy modeling is a complex process that requires data
to be collected and evaluated. At the moment, vast
amounts of open data are published on the Web ranging
from Social Media data to Government data. In
addition, Semantic Web technologies and the linked
data paradigm allow for easy re-use and integration of
data from different sources. The use of linked open data
will enhance policy modeling by allowing policy makers
to sense societal needs, understand public opinion and
predict public reactions and enabling citizens to
contribute in an agnostic manner.
1. Introduction
Policy modeling is a complex and multidimensional
process that deals with designing, formulating,
implementing and evaluating new public policies. It
requires data to be collected and evaluated in order to
be able not only to formulate the policy but also to
forecast the impact that this policy will have on the
society and plan for corrective actions. This data may
vary from prior values of economic variables to
information regarding decisions taken and the impacts
that these had on society. However, the lack of
transparency in the way this data is selected and used is
often considered a problem that could undermine the
legitimacy of the policy making process. In addition to
that, the fact that society has only limited participation
in the policy modeling process, gives rise to the
argument that political decisions are still taken by
closed groups of people without actually listening to the
real needs of society.
At the moment, vast amounts of data are being
published on the Web using formats that enable re-use
and policies that enable free access. This Web open data
includes data disseminated through Social Media
platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and Open
Government Data (OGD) initiatives.
2. Microblog Data
Microblogging services are Web applications that
enable the dissemination of short messages (microblog
posts). The most popular is Twitter, which by early
2011 distributes more than 100 million tweets per day
while is one of the most popular sites on the Web.
The last two years a number of works have been
published on the collection and analysis of microblog
data for understanding complex phenomena and
predicting relevant trends. In particular, microblog data
(coming mainly from tweets) have been successfully
used to: forecast box office revenues for movies;
spatiotemporally detect earthquakes and typhoons in
real-time; predict election results; predict stock markets;
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analyze consumers reactions to specific brands; analyze
and predict the belief that swine flu virus would become
a pandemic; predict Oscar award winners; and predict
changes in topics and identify key players and topics of
discussion in live media events.
Microblog data is an important primary material for
policy modeling that will (i) allow policy makers to
sense societal needs, understand public opinion and
predict public reactions; and (ii) enable citizens to
contribute in an agnostic manner.
3. Open Government Data
OGD refers to making public sector information
freely available in open formats and ways that enable
public access and facilitate exploitation. Lately, a large
number of OGD initiatives launched worldwide aiming
to implement one-stop portals acting as single points of
access to governmental data. These OGD portals mainly
provide objective data including statistics, reports, geospatial
information, every day incidents reports etc. in
order to enhance transparency, enable economic
growth, improve citizens’ every day life and support
public administration’s function.
4. Semantic Web
The semantic annotation of microblog data has been
recently introduced in the literature as a means to (a)
alleviate the information overload problem created by
the large quantities of new posts, (b) effectively query
relevant data, (c) facilitate reuse across different
microblogging services and (d) enable the mapping of
tweets to other data. All these approach use linked data
paradigm to realize their solutions. The central idea of
linked data is to extend the Web with a data commons
by creating typed links between data from different
sources.
5. Proposed Solution
Citizens opinions expressed through microblogging
services combined with objective data published by
governments could create a solid base on top of which
policy modeling services will be developed. The
Semantic Web technologies will be the glue to join
together the different datasets.
These policy modeling services will facilitate policy
makers in the different stages of the policy modeling
life cycle. These services could aim at societal problems
identification, trends identification on specific policy
areas, evaluation of specific proposed solutions or
actions and timely detection of public reactions.
Acknowledgments. The work presented in this paper
has been funded in part by Science Foundation Ireland
under Grant No. SFI/08/CE/I1380 (Lion-2).