An Intelligent Screening Agent to Scan the Internet for Weak Signals of Emerging Policy Issues (ISA)

Abstract

The political issues of the last decades have proven that there is a dramatic increase in complexity and potential damage of political decision. To better anticipate these future opportunities and threats, a variety of new methods like foresight and other forward looking activities are used in the foresight community. Being aware of these developments, the purpose of this publication is to present an Internet Screening Agent (ISA) for scanning the WWW for weak signals of emerging policy issues. ISA is developed as a support software for the foresight community. With ISA the community can identify relevant topics for their weak signal assessment processes. In addition to this, ISA is developed to deliver relevance indicators to this processes and in general to supply quantitative data to assessment- , transformation- and issue interpretation processes of this community. The concept of ISA is, to use “wisdom of the crowds” for efficient data acquisition, issue management and community structuring. ISA is developed in a way, that uses machine learning to improve his classification rate. So the more user participate in the classification process the better ISA will get.

Keywords

Strategic planning, emerging issues, weak signals, political agent, intelligent agents, issue management, text mining

To see the electronic version of the paper, please

Click Here