NOMAD

The NOMAD project 'Policy Formulation and Validation through non-Moderated Crowdsourcing' is an FP7 project started in January 2012, aimed at stimulating progress in the domain of ICT-enabled policy-making.

NOMAD assists policy-makers, organisations and citizens to compose and validate new policy through analyzing information available in the cloud.

At an age where collaboration and crowdsourcing are realities, NOMAD uses novel methods to provide insightful information at multiple stages of the decision-making cycle. Decision-makers can therefore detect and understand how citizens perceive their political agendas, and also stimulate the emergence of discussions and contributions on the informal web so as to gather useful feedback for immediate action.

EAACI participated in the NOMAD project as a pilot partner, under the 'UK Pilot for testing and evaluating the project’s concepts and tools'. Due to its unregulated nature, the web is full of misleading or even dangerous information. In addition to posing dangers to the life of individuals, this also threatens to disrupt professional establishments such as EAACI.

Through the use of NOMAD, EAACI aimed to redefine the crucial role of the allergy expert in information provision, as well as to make experts in the allergy field part of the health services evolution, by creating solid communication lines with public opinion-makers, policy-makers, and, on top of all, patients. Allergic diseases impacts, causes, symptoms, prevention and the immunotherapy declaration are the core themes that were deployed as domain and policy models with the NOMAD Authoring Tool, providing the input to the platform and setting the bases for the initiation of the crawling and analysis held in the backend. Via the NOMAD Visualisation Tool, the crawled and analysed results were presented, through which EAACI was able to monitor the public rhetoric for allergy on the Web.