A Decision Support System to identify core technologies, emerging research trends, novel concepts and policy needs for the Future Internet (DSS4FI)
DSS4FI aims at developing and implementing a methodology and a toolchain to support policy makers in identifying core technologies, emerging research trends, novel concepts and policy needs for the establishment of a European-led Open Internet initiative. To ensure accurate forecasting of key future technologies, DSS4FI will leverage on automatic support tools to be implemented by:
a) an optimized toolchain of novel and state-of-the-art technologies in text mining, topic detection and cognitive analysis, for automatically extracting, modeling and analyzing emerging research and technology trends from a variety of web sources;
b) a validation interface to assess the outcomes from point a) above by internal and external experts.
DSS4FI will dynamically extract information from a number of unstructured and structured sources with the purpose of informing the stakeholders (domain experts, policy-makers and economists) on relevant emerging research trends, open problems, challenges, needs and technologies in the field of the NGI. The results will be available through a Visual Analytics Interface, to support the users in answering tactical and strategic questions, like:
* What are the emerging research trends?
* Is a given research topic likely to grow, decline, stay stable or split?
The decsion support system will also help answering operational questions. Examples are:
* Where exactly are the main open problems that, if solved, could significantly impact on industry and society?
* How can policy-makers foster progress in these research areas?
* Are there research communities that work on similar or complementary topics and could profitably cooperate?
* More in general, which support actions are needed?