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Semantic Grid Tools for Rural Policy Development and Appraisal (PolicyGrid)
Director : Dr Pete Edwards (University of Aberdeen) 
What does the Node do?
The activities of the Node bring together social scientists with interests in rural policy development and appraisal with computer scientists who have experience in Grid and Semantic Web technologies. The core objective being to explore how Semantic Grid tools can be created to support social scientists and policy makers.
Aims of the Node
To facilitate evidence-based rural, social, and land-use policy-making through integrated analysis of mixed data types;
To demonstrate that Semantic Web/Grid solutions can be deployed to support various facets of evidence-based policy-making through the development of appropriate tools;
To focus on the authoring of relevant ontologies to support rural, social and land-use policy domains;
To investigate issues surrounding communication of semantic metadata to social scientists and policy practitioners;
To promote awareness of the Semantic Grid vision and supporting technologies amongst social scientists.
Social Scientists
Social scientists and policy practitioners are focusing increasingly on methods and tools for integrated policy evaluation. The importance of greater pluralism in policy evaluation approaches has grown in recent years, reflecting the increased complexities of overlapping governance and policy delivery mechanisms, and the challenge of evaluating policies with multiple, often cross-cutting, objectives. The result is increased emphasis on multi-method or mixed-methods approaches to evaluation, where emphasis is placed on plural types and sources of data, as well as diverse epistemological approaches and analytical techniques.
Mixing of Qualitative and Quantative
In practice this is characterised by increased mixing of qualitative and quantitative techniques (e.g. surveys and interviews, ethnography or phenomenology, case studies, simulations) and the mixing of formative (evaluation which tries to improve an intervention) and summative (evaluation for accountability, measuring results or efficiency) techniques.
The Semantic Grid- Powerful
The node focuses on the challenges of using Semantic Grid technologies to enable more powerful analysis of mixed-method data, thus adding significant value to the work of social scientists engaged in the analysis of evidence bases for policy evaluation, and matching evaluative capabilities to the demands of integrated policy evaluation. There should also be benefits for the wider social science community, through facilitating mixed-method analysis in other contexts.
The Node follows on from an earlier pilot project – FEARLUS-G (funded under the ESRC ‘Pilot Projects in e-Social Science’ programme.
Contact PolicyGrid