• Newsletter.1 - HEROIC – An Introduction
• Newsletter.1-We are HEROICs and how we work
• Newsletter.1 - Focus on HEROIC partners
• Newsletter 2 Strengths, weaknesses/limitations, opportunities, and threats (SWOT): analysis of the "as is" situation in RA
• Newsletter 2 The accessibility of available data: the Tox-Hub platform
• Newsletter 2 Focus On Heroic Partners
• Newsletter 3 Focus On Heroic Partners
• Newsletter 3 Examination and inventory of endpoints, data and models available for hazard and exposure assessment
• Newsletter 4 integrated risk assessment of chemical mixture
• Newsletter 4 Focus On Heroic Partners
• Newsletter 5 HEROIC consultation workshop on expert elicitation
• Newsletter 5 Expert Workshop on Extrapolation for Hazard Assessment
• Newsletter 5 Stakeholders consultation on potential socio-behaviour factors
• Newsletter 5 Focus on Heroic partners
• Newsletter 6 HEROIC roadmap to the white paper on policy and technical recommendations
• Newsletter 6 HEROIC Expert workshop on extrapolations in integrated exposure assessment, Paris, January 21-22, 2014
• Newsletter 6 HEROIC Focus on Heroic partners
• Newsletter 6 HEROIC Expert roundtable on socio-behavioural factors in risk analysis policy making
• Newsletter main page

Newsletter 2 The Accessibility Of Available Data: The Tox-Hub Platform

Scientific data cannot be easily exchanged or accessed on a broader scale because they are stored in very heterogeneous environments. There is no harmonised terminology used to categorise data, they are often available in different formats in both human and environmental disciplines and the respective databases have different structures. Consequently, it can be difficult to navigate through various data bases, to extract the desired information and to pool the data. It is one of the major objectives of HEROIC WP5 to develop the Tox-Hub platform which will facilitate the exchange of information and the better use of existing data for risk assessment.

The proposed platform will serve as a ‘Google-like’ search engine but highly specialised for integrated ecotoxicology and toxicology fields of science. The Tox-Hub will serve as a centralised platform which combines ecotoxicological and toxicological databases, thereby narrowing a web universe to a very specialised search. The user will be able to get much more specific references and a more efficient way to find information avoiding unnecessary search results. Creation of the searching preferences is followed by analysis of external references and will be executed with a corresponding algorithm which enables a highly specialised search.

Tox-Hub Architecture

The task is to implement a web services platform devoted to toxicological and ecotoxicological data, able to retrieve data from different databases (DBs). Therefore, an XML language (ToXML) is being developed to standardise and enable the dialog with the different databases.

Roles and Actors We need to distinguish three actors (or roles, colored in blue in the scheme) interacting with the system:

User: A person who interacts with the system to retrieve useful information from the human or ecotoxicological point of view.

Manager: Maintains the performance of the system tuning its performance with the general needs.

Daemon: This is a process that executes the tasks of maintenance incorporating the new information and updating the old one.

Through the Tox-Hub platform HEROIC will share the existing knowledge in a conceptual framework of data, methods and processes and make it available to all partners in the risk assessment value chain. The knowledge platform will provide a better overview of data availability. Tox-Hub also represents the e-learning platform where training materials will be made available in order to improve the capacity building in risk assessment across EU member states