Study title

The project will assist the social science community to exploit the full potential of emerging Semantic Web technologies and standards in the Grid context. It will expand upon an earlier ESRC-funded pilot demonstrator project at Aberdeen (Fearlus-G[1]) to explore the costs and benefits of using proposed Semantic Grid standards and methodology in tasks related to policy development and appraisal. Aims of the Node are as follows: To facilitate evidence-based rural, social, and land-use policy-making through integrated analysis of mixed data types, with the goal of enabling the achievement of greater sustainability through cross-sectoral policy-making; 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, and to facilitate training through workshops, etc.; To foster interdisciplinary research between social and computing scientists.