e-Social Science and Evidence-Based Policy Assessment

Abstract

The PolicyGrid project is exploring the role of Grid, Semantic Web, and Web 2.0 technologies to support e-Social Science, with particular emphasis on tools to facilitate evidence-based policy making. In this article, we discuss the challenges associated with construction of a provenance framework to support evidence-based policy assessment. We then discuss ourSpaces, a virtual research environment for e-Social Science that uses the Web 2.0 paradigm as well as Semantic Grid technologies and which provides researchers with facilities for management of digital resources using a novel natural language interface.