Timing, hosts and locations of (grouped) events of NanoImpactNet

NanoSafetyCluster - Compendium 2012
2 Summary
NHECD is free access, robust and sustainable web based
information system including a knowledge repository on the
impact of nanoparticles on health, safety and the environment. It
includes a robust content management system (CMS) as its
backbone, to hold unstructured data (e.g., scientific papers and
other relevant publications). It also includes a mechanism for
automatically updating its knowledge repository, thus enabling the
creation of a large and developing collection of published data on
environmental and health effects following exposure to
nanoparticles.
NHECD is based on text mining methods and algorithms that make
possible the transition from metadata (such as author names,
journals, keywords) to more sophisticated metadata (such as
whether the paper contains graphs) and to additional information
extracted from the scientific papers themself. These methods and
algorithms were implemented to specifically extract pertinent
information from large amount of documents. NHECD created a
systematic domain model of concepts and terms (i.e., a wide set of
domain taxonomies) to support the categorization of published
papers and the information extraction process within this project.
The unique features of NHECD allow different user groups -
academics, industry, public institutions and the public at large - to
easily access, locate and retrieve information relevant to their
needs. The creation of the NHECD knowledge repository enriches
public understanding of the impact of nanoparticles on health and
the environments; it supports a safe and responsible development
and use of engineered nanoparticles; and represents a useful
instrument for the implementation of relevant regulatory
measures and law making.
3 Background
The potential of Nanotechnology to bring scientific advancement
and different economic benefits is strictly dependent on the
success of the approaches and strategies chosen to guarantee a
safe and responsible development, production and use of
engineered nanoparticles and nano-technology-based materials
and products.
Research on the health, safety and environmental impact of
nanoparticles is currently rising due to the enlarged interest of the
general public as well policy makers. On one hand, European
industry and consumers want to learn more about these issues
since a growing number of commercial products containing
nanoparticles are currently advertised; on the other hand,
environmental groups and ethical committees are asking for the
implementation of clear and defined regulatory measures
concerning the products development and research experiment
involving Nanotechnology and especially nanoparticles.
To meet this growing demand, different institutions such as
Universities and National Task groups have started launching
electronic information repository, web portals etc. to provide to
the public access to all sorts of documents on related topics.
However, the majority of the existing databases and content
management systems are operated manually, i.e. only a limited
amount of data can be processed, and the taxonomy and ontology
guiding the documents' categorization procedure .
Due to the steadily increase of scientific papers and other types of
publications within this field, there is an urgent need for a new
quality of information management capable of handling and
processing large amounts of different types of pertinent
documents.
4 NHECD Achievements To-Date
NHECD, currently at the end of month 36, has by now achieved:
• NHECD frontend, the interface of NHECD to the three
communities targeted for it, namely nano-tox scientists, regulators
and the public. NHECD frontend is a comprehensive solution
designed to allow users to search for relevant information using a
state-of-the-art graphical user interface (GUI) matching diverse
types of users (regular users, sophisticated users and more). The
GUI allows for taxonomic search, simple / advanced search, fulltext
search, intelligent search (a unique method enables
researchers to search for the information extracted from the
scientific papers) and any combination of the above search
methods.
NHECD website is reachable at http://nhecd.jrc.ec.europa.eu
• A backend system based on a robust content management
system and its accompanying modules such as classification, full
text search and more.
• A crawling system intended to navigate selected websites in
order to obtain (automatically) all the relevant published material
related to NHECD.
• A rich set of computer based taxonomies related to the NHECD
target areas.
• A body of classified knowledge consisting of scientific papers
related to in-vivo/in-vitro, ecotox and occupational nanotoxicology.
The corpus currently contains around 10,000 papers in
NHECD subject.
• Online validation tools (IE and crawler) used to train the system
to extract information and enhance the quality of the results, as
well as to build and maintain the above body of knowledge.
• Information extraction (IE) algorithms and methods especially
crafted to create a layer of comments (in the context of NHECD
the comments are an information layer on top of the scientific
paper itself) to enhance the knowledge found on NHECD's body of
knowledge. IE results satisfactory and maturing, yet there are
some issues, such as relation extraction, for which the literature is
still being developed. NHECD keeps working towards achieving
optimal algorithms.
• The infrastructure for the backend, frontend and all related
components is established along with administration and
maintenance procedures.
236 Compendium of Projects in the European NanoSafety Cluster