These are the main project results at the end of the project:
Technical results:
• An extensible, highly scalable cloud architecture supporting generic components, made up of five layers: (1) cloud based environment and data management, (2) data acquisition and analytics, (3) policies management framework, (4) policy development toolkit, and (5) data marketplace. The architecture also incorporates a data protection and privacy enforcement mechanism which adds an ethical and legal framework to the whole architecture.
• A set of innovative tools running on top of cloud infrastructures. This includes data modelling, data cleaning, data interoperability, data aggregation, incremental data analytics, opinion mining, sentiment analysis, social dynamics and social dynamics analytics. It is important to highlight that all analytical tools and models developed during the scope of PolicyCLOUD are generic both in terms of needs, datasets, and scenarios. Analytical tools and models have been applied and reused in different use cases that contain different types of data.
• PolicyCLOUD introduces a novel approach for achieving Enhanced Semantic Interoperability in the domain of policy making, the SemAI. The latter introduces a multi-layer and hybrid mechanism for semantic interoperability across diverse policy related datasets, both within a single domain and across different policy making domains, shifting from data-based to content-based storage and retrieval.
• The PolicyCLOUD platform may be deployed over any cloud serverless environment so that the many analytics technologies can be considered as decoupled from the infrastructure.
• A method to onboard providers and resources to the EOSC catalogue and marketplace has been developed
Use case oriented results:
• Methodologies for cloud use by public authorities, encompassing not only the methodology for creating policies in cloud environments, but also an overview of the main characteristics and advantages of the cloud and big data for public administration.
• The Policy Development Toolkit (PDT), which includes the data visualisation framework, and the Policy Modelling Editor (PME). These components support the evidence based policies creation process by facilitating the use of data sources, analytical tools to process the data, and KPIs to evaluate the policies. They enable the interaction of the user with the PolicyCLOUD analytics components and the datastore, allowing policy makers to create, update and evaluate policies.
• Three use cases, comprising several scenarios, designed, prototyped and experimented in close collaboration with end-users, all of them with different requirements in terms of needs and data sets, proving the adaptability of PolicyCLOUD analytical models and tools.
Communication, exploitation and business development results:
• Continuous communication content production for the web and social media, which include news, articles, podcasts, videos and policy briefs, focusing, in the last stage of the project, on highlighting the PolicyCLOUD Pilots.
• Implementation of the outreach and stakeholder engagement strategy via workshops and webinars, e.g. the Major Cities of Europe 2022 conference, the Data for Policy 2022 or the data Week 2022 organised by the BDVA .
• Publication of a whitepaper, together with StandICT EU project, on the standardisation of data interoperability in data driven policymaking.
• Design of business models, individual and joint exploitation plans towards the sustainability of the PolicyCLOUD results.
