Defining and using a taxonomy allows the systematic organisation of knowledge around the broad topic of ICT tools for Governance and Policy Modelling. Knowledge about practitioners, methodologies, relevant use cases and context, is classified and organised according to a navigable hierarchy. More technically, the taxonomy is a tag space, that is, a hyper­-cube-­based ontology that will help in the development of a very well organised knowledge base that supports easy searching.

The building of the reference model facilitates the coherent classification of knowledge and then:

• the study of available tools and models adopted at project level in order to contribute to the final database;
• the identification of the key people and organisations (D1.2), tools and methods, case studies and best practices.

The taxonomy has been organised in order to map the knowledge base in the following domains:

• Cases, Models, Applications – WHAT has been developed

• Key People and Organizations – WHO has developed it

• Tools and Methodologies – HOW it has been developed

• Contexts of Application – WHERE it has been developed

The branches of the taxonomy related to WHERE and HOW will describe general classes that cannot be further instantiated, while the WHAT and WHO branches constitute classes that will have their final sub­classes (leaves) that will be instantiated on the final repository: this means that each of those classes will have a “population” of elements belonging to that general class and each of those elements will normally be unique.

The Knowledge Base will be the baseline for the definition of the CROSSOVER Research Roadmap as well as the main repository of Case Studies that will be part of the work to be conducted for the activities under WP5 – Evaluation and Sustainability.

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The full set of methodologies and tools has been spelled out in the taxonomy in WP13.