Advancing the Global Welfare State Information System (WeSIS), eScience Services and Research Data Management

The Information Management Project (INF project) "Advancing the Global Welfare State Information System (WeSIS), eScience Services and Research Data Management" has four major goals: (1) advancing the Global Welfare State Information System and publicly launching WeSIS for the scientific community; (2) providing eScience services and coordinating the CRC 1342's  research data management; (3) enhancing WeSIS by providing new data on political parties' social policy positions and  new  data  on spatial disparities of uneven development; and (4) jointly developing  innovative  methods in the field of computational social science and information visualisation with the projects.

(1) Based on the previous work in Phase 1 (Project A01), the first goal is to systematically enhance WeSIS as a central, web-based information system for social science data focusing on "global social policy". Five steps are essential to achieve this goal: (a) the coordination of CRC 1342's cross-project data collection on generosity and coverage and the harmonization of newly collected data; (b) the extension of WeSIS for storing text data in order to integrate data collected within project area B; (c) the implementation of tools for supporting the projects’ analysis and visual presentation of their research data; (d) the adaption of the IT infrastructure for future use-cases; (e) the public launch of WeSIS supported by publishing and distributing innovative information materials, providing multi-media support at international conferences, and offering training.

(2) The INF project serves as a service project for CRC 1342's research data management along the entire research data cycle while complying to the FAIR principles. It  offers regular training courses  in cooperation with  the University of Bremen and the State and University Library  (SuUB) as well as external (GESIS) and internal partners at SOCIUM (QualiService and Data Center of the FGZ; BIGSSS). In addition, an eScience environment is offered for supporting and strengthening the internal communication and collaborative work. All services are embedded in the local infrastructure provided by the University of Bremen (Data Science Center, IT Service Center).

(3) The INF project will lead a joint data collection with projects A06 and B04 on political parties and their ideological orientation based on a new corpus of party documents. It further enhances the foundation of WeSIS by adding data on socio-economic inequalities within and between countries in order to identify patterns of spatial disparities as outcomes of social policies. It thus provides additional data to be used as (in-)dependent variables in area-b-projects' analyses.

(4) The quality and quantity of data significantly improved during the first phase of CRC 1342, making AI methods a feasible option. Hence, the INF project will work on innovative tools based on AI methods, which will be tested within pilot studies first and provided to all projects afterwards. The focus will be on methods such as argumentation mining, text summarisation and new forms of multimodal information visualisation.