News and Announcements

We are pleased to announce the final OpenRiskNet workshop that will be organised in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on 23-24 October 2019.

The OpenRiskNet Consortium develops the OpenRiskNet e-infrastructure for the harmonisation and improved interoperability of data and software tools in the area of predictive toxicology and risk assessment. It aims to combine interoperable web services providing data or analysis, processing and modelling tools communicating over well-defined and harmonised application programming interfaces (APIs), supplemented by a semantic interoperability layer added to every service to describe the functionality whilst guaranteeing the technical and semantic interoperability.

An important task in the project, related also to the TGX case study, involved the federation of compute and data resources between the OpenRiskNet e-infrastructure and external resources. The reference environment has been designed to be capable of handling the majority of requirements for users wishes to deploy and run services. However specific situations demand solutions where either the computation, the data or both reside outside the OpenRiskNet e-infrastructure.

The Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy of OpenRiskNet e-infrastructure and website were updated based on the feedback received from the Data Protection Officer.

The new effective date is 7 May 2019.

The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) concept has been introduced to support risk assessment [1]. An AOP comprises a number of biological events: a molecular initiating event (MIE) is followed by one or more key events (KEs), leading to the adverse outcome (AO). The AOPWiki [2] is a collaborative platform to exchange AOP-related knowledge.

The use of AOPs for regulatory purposes requires detailed validation and linking to existing knowledge [3; 4]. Part of the development of AOPs is the search for data that supports the occurrence and biological plausibility of KEs and their relationships (KERs). This data can be found in literature and increasingly in databases.

In the process of utilising the analysis tools available in the OpenRiskNet e-infrastructure, data needs to be accessed from different sources and various formats. Thus, the users should be able to access different data sources and specific entries. This are then being curated using an OpenRiskNet service and re-submitted to the data source. 

Within DataCure case study, we aimed to establish a process for data curation and annotation that makes use of APIs and semantic annotations for a more systematic and reproducible data curation workflow. The development of semantic annotations and API definition for selected databases are also desired.

The two sister infrastructure projects OpenRiskNet and NanoCommons will present the two complementary approaches to provide users with risk assessment data, software and workflows at the ToxExpo part of the SOT 58th Annual Meeting in Baltimore (10-14 March 2019).

Four new deliverables reports were made publicly available through Zenodo. The complete collection of reports by OpenRiskNet consortium are also accessible in the project's Library, under Reports.