PolicyCLOUD: A prototype of a Cloud Serverless Ecosystem for Policy Analytics

We present PolicyCLOUD, a prototype for an extensible, serverless cloud-based system that supports evidence-based elaboration and analysis of policies. PolicyCLOUD allows flexible exploitation and management of policy-relevant dataflows by enabling the practitioner to register datasets and specify a sequence of transformations and/or information extraction through registered ingest functions. Once a possibly transformed dataset has been ingested, additional insights can be retrieved by further applying registered analytic functions. PolicyCLOUD was built as an extensible framework toward the creation of an analytic ecosystem. As of now, we developed several essential ingest and analytic functions that are built-in within the framework. They include data cleaning, enhanced interoperability, and sentiment analysis generic functions. PolicyCLOUD has also the ability to tap on the analytic capabilities of external tools. We demonstrate this with a Social Analytics tool implemented in conjunction with PolicyCLOUD and show how to benefit from policy modeling, design and simulation capabilities. Furthermore, PolicyCLOUD has developed a first of its kind legal and ethical framework that covers the usage and dissemination of datasets and analytic functions throughout its policy-relevant dataflows. The article describes and evaluates the application of PolicyCLOUD to four families of pilots that cover a wide range of policy scenarios.