Sense4us tool collects and analyses data to inform policy.

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The fine people at the Hansard Society have written to tell us about Sense4us, a new tool being developed at research centres across Europe that will collect information to give policy makers the most recent data and most recent, applicable information on public opinion and ongoing discussions. According to their writeup, the project will ‘create a toolkit that will support information gathering, analyzing and policy modelling in real-time’.

The British government proposes to  use Sense4us as a means to make us of the huge amount of data currently available and always growing. It will enable policy makers to access quickly and efficiently the most current information relevant to the policy they are examining; and long-term, the one of the aims is that the Sense4us tool will be able to use this array of data to ‘simulate the consequences and impact of potential policies‘, allowing policy-makers thereby to adapt their plans for the best results. It could be the first small step towards Isaac Asimov’s vision of psychohistory!

For more information, see the Hansard Society here, and the Sense4us website here.