Information visualization and policy modeling

Policy design requires the investigation of various data in several design steps for making the right decisions, validating, or monitoring the political environment. The increasing amount of data is challenging for the stakeholders in this domain. One promising way to access the "big data" is by abstracted visual patterns and pictures, as proposed by information visualization. This chapter introduces the main idea of information visualization in policy modeling. First abstracted steps of policy design will be introduced that enables the identification of information visualization need in the entire policy lifecycle. Thereafter the foundations of information visualization will be introduced based on an established reference model. We aim to amplify the incorporation of information visualization in the entire policy design process. Therefore the aspects of data and human interaction will be introduced too. The foundation leads to description of a conceptual design for social data visualization, whereas the aspect of semantics plays an important role.