eScience Support for Evidence-Based Policy Making

The social sciences are a diverse grouping of intellectual endeavour but most social science ‘disciplines’ have an applied dimension. Many social scientists engage with policy making, broadly defined, producing data to be used by those who develop and review policy or as the evaluators or critics of particular policy interventions. Evidence-based policy making, an initiative of the UK government designed to improve the quality of its decision making process, represents a move away from opinion-based decisions to making policy decisions based on evidence and is required of all aspects of policy making and of national and local government. There is considerable potential for eScience technologies to support this work. The PolicyGrid project is one of a number funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under their eSocial Science programme, and is concerned with developing Semantic Grid solutions to problems associated with evidence-based policy assessment for rural, social and land-use policy domains.