SENSE4US

The Toolbox

The Sense4us Toolbox so far

THEME ANALYSIS
The theme analysis module analyses and identifies key topics of documents relevant to the policy using machine learning and text analysis techniques. As an example of its use, it provides the user with quick summaries of documents, so the user can make a fast judgement about which ones are more relevant or useful, without having to read them all.

A side benefit of the thematic analysis is that keywords are generated from the document summaries, which may be used in other modules, e.g. searching open data or social media.

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
The emergence of social media platforms has given citizens a venue for expressing and sharing their thoughts and opinions on all kinds of topics and events. Sense4us will provide tools that summarise social media discussions and extract the key sentiment and opinion of citizens towards to a policy or the themes around a policy topic. These tools will therefore allow policy makers to detect a wide variety of citizens' reactions to policy themes, all of which contributes to more informed policy decisions.

LINKED OPEN DATA SEARCH
The module will recommend the most relevant data sources based on a policy document's summary or search terms from the policy maker and can execute distributed searches across multiple data repositories. Links between the data sources are indicated, so the user can explore themes related to the policy and potentially discover new information on related but undiscovered topics.

POLICY MODELLING
This is a module for enabling evaluation of policy options. Simulation techniques support the policy decision process by allowing evaluation of the potentially unseen impacts of the the policy situation at hand and allow different scenarios to be tested for impact. The insights obtained from the simulations can serve as complements to impact assessments and provide better means for appraising policy options.