News and Announcements

The e-infrastructure project OpenRiskNet developing a platform providing data and modelling tools for predictive toxicology and risk assessment, is entering its second stage, in which the platform is made accessible to everyone. In the first phase, we developed advanced concepts and implemented these into the first version of the platform including building and deploying of virtual research environments (VREs) and integrating the first services for different task in risk assessment accessible by everyone for testing. The platform includes harmonised and partly semantically annotated data and modelling services, corresponding training material as well as seven risk assessment case studies, which are used to evaluate and optimize the infrastructure.

A series of webinars are organised by OpenRiskNet in order to introduce the project and demonstrate on the e-infrastructure services and case studies.

First sessions are scheduled for 24 Sep 2018 (4 pm CEST) and 27 Sep 2018 (4 pm CEST). Additional dates will be selected based on the registrants preference.

Please sign up for these meeting using the doodle poll. The registrants will receive the login information by email.

All presentations and webinars recordings will be available in the Resources & Training page.

The Implementation Challenge was created to select external tools especially in areas of risk assessment not completely covered by the OpenRiskNet consortium to be prioritized for their integration into the e-infrastructure. Third parties can apply for partial financially and strongly technically support by researchers and developers of OpenRiskNet partners. If you want to make your tool visible to a large community and make it interoperable with other OpenRiskNet services, please apply at https://goo.gl/forms/D90Uxa7ZhvkGeBV72 before one of the three deadlines. More information on the selection criteria and the available funding can be found at https://openrisknet.org/associated-partner-programme/implementation-challenge/.

Harmonization and interoperability between data and computational services, the facilitation of their easy discovery, the sharing and usage of data sources as well as of the processing, analysis and modelling tools and finally a better documentation and reproducibility of the risk assessment workflows are major challenges that OpenRiskNet tries to address. The approach adopted by us to tackle these challenges is the development of a semantic interoperability layer to organize the communication between the user and the services or between two services. The blog post describes the taken approach and the first steps to describe data sources in this layer.

OpenRiskNet, a pan-European consortium funded by Horizon 2020 to develop open e-infrastructure for predictive toxicology and risk assessment, has demonstrated the results on approaches for harmonised application programming interfaces and semantic interoperability during training sessions and scientific presentations at the OpenTox Euro 2017 Conference in Basel, November 21-23 2017. Prior to these activities, the annual consortium meeting was held on 20 November to discuss the progress after twelve months in the project and plan the next steps. Moreover, the 11 European partners that make up OpenRiskNet are now launching an Associate Partner Programme to build global reach into its work.

On 25-26 Sept 2017 the Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics research group at Uppsala University organised a workshop on microservices development with a large focus on Kubernetes/OpenShift and how we can establish a CICD system within the OpenRiskNet project.

OpenRiskNet is proud to co-organize OpenTox Euro 2017 taking place at the Hotel Stücki in Basel, 21-23 November 2017. The program starts with training sessions given by OpenRiskNet partners with topics like online modeling services, workflow management and ontology annotation of datasets and software services. This will be followed by a data as well as API hackathon. In the second, the concept of semantic annotation of services will be presented and applied to a biokinetics modeling tool. Finally, the OpenTox conference will run over two days with sessions on the following topics:

• Defined approaches towards regulatory acceptance
• Simulations of exposure and transport
• Integration and interoperability: software
• Integration and interoperability: data
• High-content imaging
• Characterization of experimental conditions