PolicyCLOUD aims at delivering an integrated cloud-based environment for data-driven policy management. The environment will provide decision support to public authorities for policy modelling, implementation and simulation through identified populations, as well as for policy enforcement and adaptation. PolicyCLOUD technologies will aim at optimizing policies across sectors by utilizing the analysed inter-linked datasets and assessing the impact of policies, while considering different properties (i.e. area, regional, local, national) and population segmentations, in order to ensure high impact of the proposed policies. The PolicyCLOUD environment will realize an introduced holistic methodology for policies modelling and management based on data artefacts, while also providing a toolkit allowing both stakeholders and engaged citizens to create policies by exploiting the PolicyCLOUD models and analytical tools on various datasets, contexts and policy models. Moreover, the toolkit will allow stakeholders to specify their requirements and parameters to be considered during the collection and analysis of different datasets, thus tailoring policy making. Core to the environment will be the realization of interoperable and reusable (to different datasets, cases and scenarios) models and analytical tools that will utilize the data and analytical capacity offered by cloud environments. PolicyCLOUD will provide integrated reusable models and analytical tools, turning raw data into valuable and actionable knowledge towards efficient policy making. These tools will be applied through data functions across the complete data path realizing additional functionalities such as opinion mining, sentiment, social dynamics, and behavioral data analysis, while ensuring conformance to legal, security and ethical issues. Moreover, PolicyCLOUD will deliver a set of innovative technologies with an overall goal to enable data-driven management of policies lifecycle, from their modelling and implementation, to optimization, compliance monitoring, adaptation and enforcement. To this end, PolicyCLOUD provides a holistic solution for evidence-based policy making. It enables collection of data from different types of sources, modelling and interoperability of data to increase their potential use in cross-sector scenarios, as well as analytics to obtain insights. These core data-oriented offerings will facilitate the incorporation in the policy design process of all datasets. On top of this, PolicyCLOUD amplifies the effectiveness of policies by introducing the concept of policies collections in order to utilize policies within and across sectors and compile collective knowledge that can be exploited to identify the overcomed limitations, identify the most effective decisions and propose adaptations of policies (i.e. strategies that have impact to be “replicated” in different sectors, areas, or target populations, and accordingly others to be avoided).

The group has undertaken both the quality assurance of the program, as well as the implementation of individual key functions/applications/components, which play a major role in the acquisition, analysis, cleaning and interoperability of the data provided. More specifically, the UPRC team is responsible for the following:

• Quality assurance of the overall project and its deliverables.
• Implementing a gateway application to obtain data from different data sources, based on cloud technologies (cloud gateway & APIs component).
• Implementing the data cleaning component.
• Implementing the data interoperability component.
• Implementing an application for the analysis of the provided data in the context of the dynamics between social groups (social dynamics component).
• Implementing the data marketplace component, which is the frontend of the project and will enable the end user to search, retrieve, store and analyze specific datasets and policies.