Knowledge Base

For making administrations not only more efficient but also more effective, activities and their costs should be closely linked to strategic outcomes and broader policy objectives. A monitoring with restricted focus on financial aspects in order to assess success of public services and political programmes is not enough. To reach a holistic view on success, it is more important to consider financial ratios interlinked with quality data, impact measurements and other performance indicators.

Taking into account the complexities and importance of policy making, scientists and policy makers should be collaborating to improve outcomes of public administration. Insofar, policy makers and researchers have different mentalities, languages, time horizons and imperatives. Ways of bridging the gap between both of them are necessary. Organisational changes, knowledge sharing and new platforms for cooperation can be helpful to close the gap and support collaboration between science and administration.

Information is an asset that is constitutive to the effective and efficient supply of public services. To ensure that information meets the purposes for which it is intended, it must be accurate, accessible, valid, timely, complete and relevant (relevance especially means regional explicit information). [1]
In all the interviews that we conducted, it has become very clear and verified that information plays a very important role in policy making processes.

Knowledge management affects the organisation´s technical assets as well as the employees’ willingness to share knowledge. Knowledge is an essential resource in public administrations and has to be stored in order to not get lost for the organisation. As a main reason for the loss of knowledge, participants of our focus group with a socialpolitical background named the retirement of employees. That is why it is important to build up a learning culture, to ensure and promote knowledge transfer within the organisation, as well as with relevant stakeholders.

Stable rules enable continuous and reliable control of public administration, which acts within a legal framework. Therefore, public administrations’ work requires stability, consistency, precision and unambiguity of legal regulation. [1]

The DCAT Application Profile for data portals (DCAT-AP) is a specification based on the Data Catalogue vocabulary (DCAT) for describing public sector datasets in Europe. Its basic use case is to enable cross-data portal search (primary Open Data Portals) for data sets and make public sector data better searchable across borders and sectors. This can be achieved by the exchange of descriptions of datasets among data portals.

An App, which collects data and shows weather related information (e.g. duration of rain showers) but also predicts the weather in the Netherlands

The analysis is powered by a hybrid Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine that runs highly sophisticated linguistic algorithms and Machine Learning classifiers. The engine is wrapped in a platform-agnostic REST API service that enables your software applications, workflows, and services to receive rich TheySay JSON metadata with minimal integration work

Google Fusion tables is a web application for data analysis, large data-set visualisation, and mapping. It allows users to easily create data visuals and publish them online instantly with provided subsets and an easy format similar to online files. It further supports the ability to work through larger data sets including filtering, sorting, summarising them in collaboration with other users online. It enables users to share and combine multiple tables between users and publicly available data and merge them into one. The application is still experimental and its API has released V2

Opinion Crawl is an online sentiment analysis for current events, companies, products, and people. Opinion Crawl allows visitors assess Web sentiment on a topic – a person, an event, a company or a product. The user can enter a topic and get an ad-hoc sentiment assessment of it. For each topic, the user gets a pie chart showing current real-time sentiment, a list of the latest news headlines, a few thumbnail images, and a tag cloud of key semantic concepts that the public associates with the subject.