Cloud for Data Driven Policy Management

Policymaking has always revolved around the initiative to solve problems and since the start of more focused research on it, it contained many stages from problem identification and agenda setting to policy formulation, legitimization, implementation and evaluation. As policymaking evolved and societal challenges became more complex, policymakers tried to include more factors into the decision-making process and thus data driven policymaking became an important tool in this field. Data driven policymaking aims to make optimal use of data and extensive analysis in order to create and evaluate policies.

The handling of data that is required has raised various legal and ethical issues that are hard to tackle on a case to case basis, without solid guidelines and standards. This need for standardization in data driven policymaking is more crucial due to the heterogeneity of the modern data sources and the interoperability of data. Several standards have been developed around this notion and were examined in the scope of the H2020 Policy Cloud project.

In order to cover the project’s needs, a 3-dimensional end-to-end analysis is proposed, which uses a novel Interim Repository to facilitate the ethical and legal analysis on the interoperable data. This approach tries to find the balance between legal/ethical compliance and registrability of analytics, a fine line that most policymaking services need to optimize.