Final OpenRiskNet Workshop report

11 November 2019

The Final OpenRiskNet Workshop was organised on 23-24 October 2019 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The topic of the events was "Creating powerful workflows combining data and software services demonstrated on risk assessment case studies". The workshop was attended by 53 participants, representing all OpenRiskNet stakeholders (scientific, industrial and regulatory communities). This ensured that all relevant and targeted groups that need to be aware of the project achievements have access to this information and are enabled to give feedback, and also be trained on the provided solutions.

The event aimed to disseminate the achievements and implemented concepts of the project, make the stakeholders aware of the solutions developed and find the best options for the adoption by other projects or organisations. The event offered the opportunity for the OpenRiskNet services users, developers and administrators as well as the members of related e-infrastructure communities like EOSC to interact with OpenRiskNet developers, modellers and project managers. Strong focus was put on experiences from the community building efforts fostered by the associated partner programme and the implementation challenges, establish and strengthen links to other projects and organise the transfer of the technology into further initiatives presented by both sides, consortium members but even more important associated partners.

The first part of the 2-day event focused on the OpenRiskNet case studies, demonstrations, posters and hands-on training sessions, where the teams involved in the development and implementation presented and demonstrated the use of the services included in the OpenRiskNet e-infrastructure covering all aspects from setting up the infrastructure and virtual environments, deploying services to the use of specific services, combining them and their use in complex workflows to address specific risk assessment tasks:

  • Case studies flash presentations

  • Workflows: practical example of Jupyter notebooks use, Data curation example, workflow across multiple case studies

  • Deploying Applications (addressed to developers, services providers and infrastructure admins)

  • Modelling exercise (built around the ModelRX case study, support of the DataCure) (addressed to end-users)

  • Ontology and semantic annotations

The second day focused on the outreach and sustainability aspects of the project. The associated partners and Implementation Challenges winners presented their achievements and the status of the integration of their services in the e-infrastructure:

  • Strategy used to build confidence in PROSILICO's in silico methods for prediction of human clinical ADME/PK

  • FAME 3: Predicting the Sites of Metabolism in Small Molecules for Phase 1 and Phase 2 Metabolic Enzymes and FAME 3 API in OpenRiskNet

  • Using SPARQL to explore human protein data in neXtProt and beyond

  • ToxicoGx: An R platform for integrated toxicogenomics data analysis

  • US EPA AOP-DB: A database resource for the exploration of Adverse Outcome Pathways

  • ToxPlanet: demo, information on API, discussion on use case scenarios

This session was concluded by a lecture and demonstrations on Diamond Light Source as the OpenRiskNet’s first external Virtual Environment deployment, and lessons learned from the associated partner programme.

The final but very important topic of this event was related to the project sustainability measures, the support and maintenance of the infrastructure after the end of the project. Collaborations and links created with other communities were presented and discussed with representatives of other major pan-European infrastructures and policy makers like NanoCommons and EOSC (including here EOSC-hub, OpenAIRE or eInfraCentral).

The adoption of OpenRisknet solutions by NanoSafety community and NanoCommons infrastructure was shown, while the EOSC session included several lectures and demonstration:

  • Introduction to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and OpenAIRE: an EOSC implementation project

  • eInfraCentral: an EOSC implementation project

  • EOSC-hub: an EOSC implementation project

  • Technical demo of cloud and storage services in EOSC

The workshop concluded with a panel discussion on the lessons learned and next steps, funding opportunities and alignment with EOSC initiative, services marketplace and the EOSC early adopters calls.

The Booklet of this event with its complete description, agenda, abstracts and additional information is available online. Also, all the presentations and materials used during the event are available on the workshop web page.