Faceman.esc.abdn.ac.uk

Metadata for Social Simulation
 What kind of activities are undertaken in social simulation? What are the relationships between these activities? What kinds of metadata support do they need?  Activities in social simulation (for each of these activities, consider how it relates to the other activities, and what kinds of metadata are needed):  Is it possible to draw up a general specification of metadata requirements for social simulation, or do social simulation projects differ in too many respects for this to be feasible?  What software tools are needed (or would be useful) to support the activities listed, and the generation of the required metadata relevant to each activity?  Work done in PolicyGrid in relation to social simulation will be shown during the workshop: how closely does this work relate to the requirements emerging from discussion of the key questions set out above? Metadata for Social Science Resources
 What kind of experiences have people had with the UK Data Archive1  Which document/data types and other resources would researchers deposit?  What kind of information would typically (or occasionally) be specified about these  What kind of metadata support does social science need? Is the attached UKDA-based scheme acceptable for annotating resources, or is it experienced as too restrictive, or too general? Is it possible/feasible to describe all resources using one scheme?  What is better, freedom for the user or restrictions to prevent nonsensical entries?  What methods (if any) should be used to influence effective user behaviour?  What tools (visualisation, graphics, other) might be preferred for visualising and specifying  How restrictive does the demonstrated WYSIWYM application seem?  How could the system give more freedom to the user (to describe their resources)?  What kind of experiences have people had with annotation tools such as NVivo?  What is appreciated, and what is deplored, about existing annotation tools?  In qualitative data analysis, how is coding carried out by researchers? Is there any  How feasible is a distinction between free and structured codes?  What kind of relationship can there be between codes (both free and structured)? (E.g. is  Has anyone had experience of cases where a merging of free or structured codes might  How useful is the demonstrated Squanto application’s basic functionality?  What about its potential to search for and present information from elsewhere on the Web? Is it useful, irritating? Which other functionalities might be useful? Metadata for Evidence-Based Methodology
 What do social scientists mean by “evidence-based policy”?  What are the models of evidence-based policy development and appraisal? APAT is one approach - but are there others?  Do these methods share any common features?  How would a researcher typically characterise the methodology underpinning an evidence- What would it be important for another researcher/stakeholder to know about your methods? Is it sufficient to describe the resources (survey instruments, datasets, etc.) produced during a policy appraisal – or are there higher-level methodological characteristics that need to be specified? questionnaireY) sufficient to capture methodology? Does the demonstrated WYSIWYM interface seem useful?  How feasible is it to describe workflow in evidence based policy appraisal? Would it be useful to share such workflows?  What is the outcome of the process of evidence-based policy analysis: evidence or an outcome (conclusion, argument) derived from the evidence? If the outcome is derived from evidence what type of reasoning is used? Is such reasoning performed within a framework? Are the approaches linear or are there feedback loops? Is Compendium a good tool to support the process of evidence-based policy appraisal?  Is the kind of support provided by Araucaria when building and evaluating arguments useful? Can this show the kinds of reasoning used in argumentation? Can it show the nature of the arguments constructed?

Source: http://faceman.esc.abdn.ac.uk:8080/policygrid/documents/workshop2/policygrid_ws2_disc_issues.pdf