Big Data, Semantics, and Policy-Making

Abstract

At the heart of all policy design and implementation, there is a need to understand how well decisions are made. It is evidently known that the quality of decision making depends significantly on the quality of the analyses and advice provided to the associated actors. Over decades, organizations were highly diligent in gathering and processing vast amounts of data, but they have given less emphasis on how these data can be used in policy argument. With the arrival of big data, attention has been focused on whether it could be used to inform policy-making. This chapter aims to bridge this gap, to understand variations in how big data could yield usable evidence, and how policymakers can make better use of those evidence in policy choices. An integrated and holistic look at how solving complex problems could be conducted on the basis of semantic technologies and big data is presented in this chapter.