Policy Formulation & Validation through nonmoderated

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1 Newsletter Volume 1, November 2013 Policy Formulation & Validation through nonmoderated crowd sourcing Dear readers, Welcome to the first newsletter of the NOMAD project. NOMAD is an ICT project for Governance and Policy Modeling co-funded by the European commission under the FP7. The vision of NOMAD is to provide decisionmakers with fully automated solutions for content search, acquisition, categorisation and visualisation that work in a collaborative form in the policy-making arena. In this newsletter, we provide you with information about the latest developments of the project, upcoming and past events as well as recent publications. Thank you for your interest in our work! The NOMAD team Contents Interview with the Project Coordinator 2 Project News 4 Upcoming events 5 Recent Events 6 Publications 8 The NOMAD Partners 9 NOMAD Contacts 10

2 2 Changing the way policies are designed, decided and enforced an interview with NOMAD project Coordinator Prof. Yannis Charalabidis Dr. Yannis Charalabidis is Ass. Professor in the University of Aegean, in the area of egovernance Information Systems, coordinating policy making, research and pilot application projects for governments and enterprises worldwide. A computer engineer with a PhD in complex information systems, he has been employed for several years as an executive director in Singular IT Group, leading software development and company expansion in Europe, India and the US. He writes and teaches on Government Service Systems, Enterprise Interoperability, Government Transformation and Citizen Participation. Could you please tell us a few words about the FP 7 subject area of the Nomad Project? NOMAD is a research project under the area of ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling, which addresses the challenges of empowerment of citizens and increase transparency through the utilization of ICT tools to support decision-making. The key research question of this theme, paving the wave to Digital Science, is how ICT can transform governance and policy making combining crowdsourcing techniques with data mining functionalities and advanced methods of modeling and simulation, with the objective of achieving open and collaborative governance. What is the 2013 Samos summit? The project has recently co-organized the fourth Samos 2013 Summit on Digital Innovation for Government, Business and Society, which was held in the island of Samos in Greece, on July 1 5, During the Summit, in which more than 100 high caliber research, administrations and enterprises experts from 20 countries have participated, new actions and guidelines for ICT in the context of the Digital Agenda and the new Framework Programme HORIZON 2020 were presented. In addition, more than 15 international research projects, among them NOMAD, showcased their proposals and shared ideas for new online services and tools for policy-making and e-participation. NOMAD had also the chance to exchange ideas with younger members of the research community, the students of the 1st International Summer School on Open and Collaborative Governance held in conjunction with the Samos 2013 Summit, to whom project tutorials were provided. Can you please describe Nomad in a few and simple words? The project aims to introduce into the policy-making process an array of new techniques and opportunities emerging through the massive use of the social web. Therefore, it will deliver to decision-makers a comprehensive environment for content search, acquisition, classification and visualization that will enable them understand citizens opinion, arguments and needs as expressed in Web 2.0 and affect their policy-making agenda. NOMAD s vision can be summarized in changing the way policies are designed, decided and enforced. To achieve this, NOMAD develops an innovative toolset employing techniques on data and opinion mining and the AI/ philosophy concerning the conceptual representation of policies and the argumentation theories. Why is such a project interesting for the Aegean University? AEGEAN University is a research organization with high expertise in Policy Modeling, Data Mining, Evaluation Models and in general in the ICT-enabled governance area. Therefore, is interested in accumulating and expanding the knowledge that will stem from the project through academic work and as well, disseminating NOMAD results in the scientific community.

3 3 Are there many RTD projects around use of social media in policy-making, what is the specificity of Nomad? There are some other projects that exploit the power of Social Media in the policy-making arena, for example PADGETS, WeGov, +Spaces, FUPOL etc. However, what differentiates NOMAD from is what is called non-moderated crowdsourcing, meaning that it searches on the Web places where users have been expressed without any stimulation and collects massive amounts of data. In addition content retrieved is correlated with specific components of policy proposal as depicted in the policy model that the NOMAD user authors. What do you consider as a break-through innovation in the development of the project so far? NOMAD, has so far released the first prototypes of the innovative tools that are going to be integrated in the final platform, among them the Model Authoring tool, for creating policy models in an easy and intuitive way, a technique for processing and annotation of arguments expressed in Social Web. Who do you think the end users will be? Two policy institutions and one NGO are already involved as end users in the pilot applications of NOMAD, i.e. the Greek Parliament, the Austrian Parliament and the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EACCI). Apart from policy makers and policy advisors, which consist the core target group of NOMAD, a plenty of groups have been identified as potential users that can benefit from the usage of the NOMAD tools, such as journalists, researchers, business analysts, representatives of NGOs, federations and associations. However, NOMAD will be an easy to use system, available for every citizen who is interested in searching and analyzing the Social Web against a specific topic. The link between new technologies and freedom of expression are important avenues for promoting democracy. Are there risks on the right to freely express one-self emanating from such a project? NOMAD and other relevant projects, processing content expressed freely on Web do it in and aggregated way and preserve users anonymity, so that they comply on privacy specifications laid down by the competent authorities. As soon as the identity of sources of content is hidden, there is no risk on biasing freedom of expression.

4 4 Project News Survey on Web 2.0 platforms and Users Requirements Definition During the first year, the NOMAD project team performed a thorough examination of Web 2.0 platforms and applications with political content and the most popular Social Media Platform Interfaces. Also an analysis of the current landscape of Web 2.0 in relation to policy making and stakeholders in the three pilot countries (Greece, Austria, UK) was conducted. The NOMAD team defined and reported User Requirements, through questionnaires and focus groups, inside and outside the consortium. The related public reports can be found here. NOMAD first Prototype The NOMAD technical community has successfully delivered the first toolset of NOMAD prototype. The NOMAD prototype comprises of modules for the provision of the following services: Crawling services The module is a prototype of a service that is responsible for retrieving content from Web 2.0 sources that will be subjected to further analysis within the NOMAD system. The module comprises distinct components for retrieving content from different platforms. The components are organized via an orchestrating module and are viewed as a complete module by the rest of the NOMAD system, in accordance with the NOMAD architectural design. The implementation of the NOMAD Data Acquisition and Management Module has been completed and the service has been installed in the NOMAD server. Linguistic Analysis The module is a prototype of a set of linguistic tools that analyses the acquired content in order to extract the necessary information. The prototype comprises the following components: The Keyword Inflation & Thematic Classification Service The Demographics Extraction Service The Segment Extraction Service The Term Extraction Service The Linguistic Pipeline Orchestrator (Controller) Sentiment Analysis This module is a prototype of a service that is responsible for discovering opinionated content segments in the acquired content and determining its polarity towards the entities defined by a given policy for a specific domain. Argument Extraction This module is a general-purpose conceptualization of policies and arguments, defining the conceptual foundation upon which the top-level ontology of policies and arguments, individual use case vocabularies, and the data model are developed. The scope of delivery includes (a) a report, analysing the structure of policies and arguments at the conceptual level; (b) the corresponding OWL ontology; and (c) the SQL data model for storing content and policy data and metadata that receives its semantics from the NOMAD ontology.

5 5 Model Authoring This module is the authoring environment (prototype) that allows domain experts to express their understanding of the issues at the conceptual level, as an instantiation of the machine-readable data model. Emphasis will is given on developing a visual tool that allows domain experts without technical expertise to author policy models by re-using existing ontologies and data. Visual analytics This module provides information visualization and visual analytics techniques to give politicians visual-interactive access to the analysis results coming from text analysis, and additional demographic meta-information. More specifically, this WP is dedicated to visually support selected steps of the text analysis process, and enable the visual-interactive analysis of the automatically computed text analysis results. Many of the produced tools of NOMAD community are open source and will be very soon available (check the NOMAD website). Public deliverables of the project are also available on the NOMAD website. Next Steps The NOMAD project community will launch the following Pilots during November: Pilot 1: The Greek Strategy for Energy planning - to be launched by Hellenic Hellenic Parliament Pilot 2: European policies on the treatment of allergy to be launched by European Academy of Allergology and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) Pilot 3: Information management and involvement of civil society within the legislative process to be launched by Austrian Parliament The NOMAD project community is happy to announce that the project has successfully passed the first project review thanks to common efforts and good work! Upcoming events ICT 2013 Conference, 6 th of November 2013, Vilnius-Lithuania NOMAD will be present at ICT 2013 Conference where speakers from across the ICT sector will address a range of issues from cloud computing, broadband, ICT infrastructures, ICT skills, cyber security, long term visions on the future and much more. The conference will be held at VIlnius, Lithuania on the 6 th of November 2013

6 6 Recent Events NCSR Demokritos organized the Multiling-2013 workshop, in the context of the International Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013, 4-9 August), at Sofia, Bulgaria. MultiLing 2013 ( is a community effort, a set of research tasks and a corresponding workshop which focuses on the multilingual aspect of summarization. IRSS 2013: International Research-Centered Summer School in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Robotics, Data and Content Analysis, July 4th July 31st, NCSR Demokritos, Athens, Greece. NCSR Demokritos, ATC and Google supervised a team of two students, Theodosis Goudas and Christos Louizos, who performed research in the areas of argument extraction from social media and visualization of ontologies through mind graphs. The team was awarded the 3 rd prize! Click here for more information. Gov.insight application and Nomad project in the Epikaira magazine. Click here for more information. "Open, Collaborative Governance" Workshop, February 22nd 2013, NCSR Demokritos Athens-Greece The Aegean University and NCSR Demokritos presented NOMAD in a workshop whose purpose was to present innovative and best practices and research approaches in the field of Electronics, Open, and Collaborative Governance. The event took place in the premises of NCSR Demokritos in Athens on the 22 nd of February Click here for more information. tgovernment Workshop 2013 (tgov2013), March 22nd - 23rd, 2013, Business School, Brunel University, West London, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom. On March the 22nd and 23rd of 2013 The Aegean University, the NOMAD project coordinator, presented at tgov 2013 the paper Requirements and Technological Architecture for a Passive Crowdsourcing

7 7 International Conference on Policy Making 2.0, June 2013, Trinity College, Dublin- Ireland NOMAD was presented by the Aegean University to the International Conference on Policy Making 2.0 held in Trinity College in Ireland on the 17 th & 18 th of June The conference was about the emerging technologies and trends that are changing the way policy is made. 4th Samos Summit on Digital Innovation for Government, Business and Society, July 1 5, 2013, Samos- Greece NCSR Demokritos and Athens Technology Center (ATC) presented NOMAD at the Samos 2013 Summit on Digital Innovation for Government, Business and Society, on July the 3rd, 2013, in Samos Island, Greece. For more information about Samos Summit 2013 click here. Hellenic Parliament Focus Group on Nomad usability in policy making, August 1 st, 2013, Athens-Greece The Aegean University and NCSR Demokritos organized a Focus Group in the Hellenic Parliament to discuss the NOMAD usability in policy making and formulating the Greek pilot. The event took place on the 1 st of August 2013.

8 8 Publications In the first year of the NOMAD project the NOMAD research and scientific community was very productive! The following publications have been made during this project period. Charalabidis Y., Triantafillou A., Karkaletsis V. and Loukis E., Public Policy Formulation through Non Moderated Crowdsourcing in Social Media, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 7444, 2012, pp Petasis, A. Krithara, A. Ferrara, V. Karkaletsis, Bootstrapping Ontology Evolution: A Generic Approach Relying on Ontology - based Information Extraction, LREC 2012 Euripidis L., Charalabidis Y and Diamantopoulou V., Different Digital Moderated and Non- Moderated Mechanisms for Public Participation, European, Mediterranean & Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems 2012 Loukis E., Charalabidis Y and Xenakis A., POLICY-RELATED KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN PARLIAMENTS BASED ON AN EXTENSION OF IBIS FRAMEWORK, May 8th 9th 2012, Brunel University, United Kingdom Karkaletsis, V., Karampiperis, P, Konstantopoulos, S., "Social networks as a resource for policy formulation", Intersocial Workshop on Online Social Networks: Challenges and Perspectives, Patras, Greece, 15/06/2012. Koukourikos, A., Karampiperis, P., Vouros, G. and Karkaletsis, V. "Using Open Information Extraction and Linked Open Data towards Ontology Enrichment and Alignment", 5th International Workshop on Ontology, Models Conceptualization and Epistemology in Social, Artificial and Natural Systems, Gdansk, Poland, 25/06/2012. Giannakopoulos, G., Karkaletsis, V., "Together we stand NPowER-ed", 14th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, Karlovasi, Samos, Greece, 24/03/2013, LNCS Volume 7817, 2013, pp Scaltsas T. and Konstantopoulos S., Arguments and their linguistic realization, XXIII World Congress of Philosophy, 2013 Florou, Ei., Konstantopoulos S., Koukourikos A. and Karampiperis P., Argument extraction for supporting public policy formulation, Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities, pages 49 54, Sofia, Bulgaria, August Charalabidis Y., Karkaletsis V., Triantafillou A., Androutsopoulou A. and Loukis E., Requirements and Architecture of a Passive Crowdsourcing Environment, e-part 2013 conference, Koblenz, Germany, September 2013 G. Petasis, D. Spiliotopoulos, N. Tsirakis, P. Tsantilas: Large-scale Sentiment Analysis for Reputation Management. In PATHOS 2013 Workshop, GSCL 2013, September, 2013, Darmstadt, Germany. Loukis E., Charalabidis Y., Spiliotopoulou L., Diamantopoulou V, A Framework for Utilizing Web 2.0 Social Media for Participative Governance, European, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems (EMCIS 2013), October, 2013, Windsor, UK T. Ruppert, J. Bernard, and J. Kohlhammer: Bridging Knowledge Gaps in Policy Analysis with Information Visualization. Conference on Electronic Government (egov), G. Petasis, D. Spiliotopoulos, N. Tsirakis, P. Tsantilas: Large-scale Sentiment Analysis for Reputation Management. Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (JLCL), to appear.

9 9 The NOMAD Partners NOMAD is the joint effort of a small, experienced and highly-specialised Consortium of partners. It is well balanced between industry and academia with particular experience in delivering breakthrough solutions in the policy making lifecycle. Aegean (GR) Aegean is an academic and research organisation with expertise in Policy Modeling, Web 2.0 technologies, Data mining, Visualisation Tools and Evaluation Models. Google Ireland (IR) Google Ireland is Widely recognised Industrial partner with expertise in Social Networking Tools and Services. Athens Technology Center (GR) Athens Technology Center (ATC) is an IT solutions and services provider (SME) targeting specific sectors incl. the Media, Banking and Retail Sectors, Utilities and Public Sector Organisations. ATC also has an extensive experience in the coordination of large-scale EU and National projects. NCSR D (GR) NCSR D is a research group with long expertise in information extraction, knowledge representation & inference, and machine learning. CP (UK) CP is a consulting company with long experience in social media monitoring and OSInt (Open Source Intelligence), having invested significant resources in developing methodologies for understanding online populations and contextualising vast amounts of online data. Fraunhofer IGD (DE) Fraunhofer IGD is a research organisation with expertise in information visualization and visual analytics, with a focus on the interactive and semanticsbased visualisation of decision-critical information as well as solutions for the financial industry. Kantor Qwentes SA (BE) Kantor Qwentes SA is a European institutional communications company with experience in developing communication strategies and implementing them through all communication tools and channels with focus on content development, graphic design, print and web services. AUP (AU) AUP is the Austrian public body competent for the conduct of parliamentary auxiliary services and administrative matters as well as technical services. HeP (GR) The Hellenic Parliament is the supreme democratic institution that represents the citizens through an elected body of Members of Parliament (MPs). HeP is involved in EU projects, supporting the Parliament s Institutional role in shaping Greek foreign policy.

10 10 NOMAD Contacts Project Coordinator Yannis Charalabidis Assistant Professor, Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean Scientific Coordinator Associate Professor, Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean Scientific Coordinator Dr. Vaggelis Karkaletsis Research Director at IIT in NCSR Demokritos Dissemination Manager Philippe Claeys Administrateur Kantor Qwentes SA Project Website: The presence of NOMAD on major social networking such as Facebook, Twitter, AND LinkedIn has been established. We invite you to Get Informed, Interact and Follow NOMAD! This project is co-funded by the EC under the FP7 Programme. This newsletter reflects the views only of the Consortium, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herein.