SENSE4US

Dear readers,

Sense4us project had a busy and demanding summer, in preparation of completing its first year tasks. The toolbox that is being developed in order to assist policy makers is a work in progress, but we are very glad to present today the modules that currently are a part of it: Theme Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, Linked Open Data Search and Policy Impact Analysis. Our toolkit will help policy makers access and summarise a wide array of data, take into account the views of citizens on policy issues and better understand the implications of proposed policies.

Project partners dedicated a lot of their efforts and time presenting their academic work – papers and articles – in many national, European and international conferences and events, thus making the project better known to the scientific community.

During these past few months, we also had the opportunity to contact several other FP7 projects and investigate possible future collaborations. These contacts have been fruitful and in the upcoming newsletter issues we will be happy to announce their results!

If you have any comments or suggestions, we will be more than glad to receive them, so please feel free to contact us at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Enjoy the reading!

The Sense4us Dissemination and Communication Team

We present the Sense4us Toolbox!

Sense4us assists policy makers by providing novel tools that will make sense of multitudes of information that may be relevant to policy and to examine the impact of a proposed policy.

Theme Analysis

This module analyses and identifies topics from any document using text analysis and machine learning. The topics extracted provide the user with a quick summary of the document or group of documents, so the user can make a quick judgement about which ones are more relevant or useful, without having to read them all.

An additional benefit of the thematic analysis is that the keywords extracted from the documents may be used for further, more detailed searches in open data repositories or on social media platforms.

Sentiment Analysis

The emergence of social media has given citizens a space to share their thoughts and opinions on all kinds of topics and events. Sense4us will provide tools that summarise social media discussions and extract the key sentiments and opinions of citizens towards to a policy or related political issue. These tools will therefore allow policy makers to tune into a wide variety of citizens’ reactions to policies and political issues, all of which will contribute to more informed policy decisions.

Linked Open Data Search

This module will recommend the most relevant data sources based on the analysis of a document or search terms entered by the policy maker, and will execute distributed searches across multiple data repositories. Links between the data sources will be indicated, so the user can explore themes and datasets related to the policy, potentially discovering new information on previously unexplored topics.

Policy Impact Analysis

This module will assist policy makers in evaluating policy options. Simulation techniques support the policy development process by analyzing the potentially unseen impact of a proposed policy and allowing different scenarios to be tested and their consequences assessed. The insights obtained from the simulations can inform a comprehensive policy impact assessment.

Our updated promotional materials are now available!

We recently updated our promotional material to showcase the Sense4us toolbox! The project poster, the brochure and the factsheet are all online and available to download!

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