The UK PolicyGrid tries to design and implement a middleware infrastructure that supports policy-related research activities based on social science research. The project called “Semantic Grid Tools for Rural Policy Development & Appraisal” (nb. it’s not difficult to imagine similar policy grid for educational policy decision-making and research). The design of the middleware is based on the provenance architecture. It requires to provide a 'thick' description of the contextual information that allows to interpret data and resources adequately (e.g., Who, What, Where, Why, When, Which and How the resource was created). The concept of the Semantic Grid is central to the design of this project.
Challenging idea?“One of the most significant challenges we face is non-technical. While disciplines such as Chemistry have a very long tradition of using lab books, meticulously recording every step they perform, the same practice is not so well embedded in social science. This means that it will be a challenge to persuade social scientists to record their data and methods of working in the detail they require for reuse. It is also difficult to obtain concrete requirements because the social scientists themselves do not know precisely what it is they want to record or even query using the provenance metadata. This means that the design of the architecture has to be flexible enough to develop as our work progresses.” (Chorley et al., 2007)Semantic Grid + Web 2.0?
It looks that ICT community becomes more sceptical about the Semantic Web and starts to speak about the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies in parallel (e.g., URL). Could the combination of those two technologies be a better solution for social e-research and policy infrastructure?
Potentially, 'Yes'. The Semantic Web goes well with government’s possibilities to create "top-down" more logical and well structured social data network and to get out of it robust data-based evidence. Meantime, Web 2.0 nicely goes with the egalitarian culture of research community and allows to build network "bottom-up". Altogether, this combination well matches epistemic diversity of social research approaches, techniques, data types and contexts.
But, to design one is nothing… to fly one is a real challenge. Links and references- Chorley, A., Edwards, P., Preece, A., & Farrington, J. (2007). Tools for tracing evidence in social science. Paper presented at the Third International Conference on e-Social Science, Ann Arbor, MI, US, October 7-9, 2007. URL
- PolicyGrid URL
- Semantic Grid Community Portal URL
- Web 2.0 and Grids Workshop at OGF21 URL
- The Third International Conference on e-Social Science, 2007 URL