Combining social and government open data for participatory decision-making

Abstract

In the last years, several research endeavors were launched aiming at involving popular social media platforms in electronic participation. These early endeavors seem to present some essential limitations related mainly to scalability and uptake. In order to avoid these limitations, we introduce a two-phased approach for supporting participatory decision-making based on the integration and analysis of social and government open data. The proposed approach is based on the literature related to the analysis of massive amounts of social data for future events prediction. In this paper we also present a Web data driven architecture for the implementation of the proposed approach. The architecture is based on the use of linked data paradigm as a layer that will enable integration of data from different sources. We anticipate that the proposed approach will (i) allow decision makers to understand and predict public opinion and reaction about specific decisions; and (ii) enable citizens to inadvertently contribute in decision-making. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.