Information visualisation and visual analytics for governance and policy modelling

Professionals involved in governance and policy modelling have seen a dramatic increase in the volume of potentially relevant data. As in many other knowledge-based fields today, policy makers face the problem of an information overload. Putting data from sources as diverse as blogs, online opinion polls and government reports to effective use is a task which requires new tools for their analysis and visualisation. In this paper, we introduce the research field known as Visual Analytics and we argue that it can help policy makers integrate large amounts of heterogeneous data into their decisionmaking processes. In so doing, Visual Analytics has the potential to increase not only the relevance, but also the legitimacy of policy decisions. In addition, policy modelling could provide the Visual Analytics community with new research challenges