Perspectives and methods in the development of technological tools for supporting future studies in science and technology

The term "future studies" refers to studies based on the prediction and analysis of future horizons, able to examine the long-term impact of policies and technologies, and to anticipate emerging social challenges. Those studies experience today an emerging interest, also due to the large sets of data made available by the social media and big data phenomena. This paper presents a review of widely adopted approaches in these study activities, with three levels of detail scale: starting from a wide scale mapping of related disciplines, the second level focuses on the traditionally adopted methodologies and, on the level of greater detail, the paper describes methodological and software analysis tools that cope also with the semantic web and social media aspects. The paper finally proposes the architecture of an extensible and modular support platform for these study activities, able to offer and integrate a number of tools and functionality oriented to the harmonization of aspects related to semantics, document warehousing and social media aspects.