Publications

eNanoMapper publications

Publications published by our Consortium members on topics related to the eNanoMapper project.

The eNanoMapper consortium brings considerable experience in designing and building a predictive toxicology framework for chemicals. Within the FP7 OpenTox project the partners (IST, DC, IDEA, NTUA) identified the 5 main issues (ensuring uniform access to distributed resources as data, computer models, validation and reporting) and built a distributed services framework, based on a common Application Programming Interface (API).

While the OpenTox framework is intentionally chemical compound centric, currently, within the FP7 ToxBank project, the framework is being extended (IST, DC, IDEA, KI) to handle diverse sets of biological experimental data (high throughput, omics, High Content Analysis) and bioinformatics analysis.

The approach to seek uniform access via a common API, not necessarily a single implementation and a single data model, builds on the established engineering practice in other domains (e.g. computer networking). The lessons learnt from OpenTox and EPA’s ToxCast program have been recognized as key towards establishing an integrated framework for predictive toxicity of ENMs (Damoiseaux 2011).

eNanoMapper hence builds on common components and APIs to address data and models interoperability challenges. It will use semantic technologies to characterize ENMs, link databases and ensure a flexible data model. Minimum information standards and existing formats and tools such as ISA-TAB will be employed to capture experimental metadata and protocols. The proposed distributed web services technology will allow flexible data sharing and industry strength security solution to guarantee data protection. Last but not least, the common API will allow building user friendly interfaces tailored to the needs of different user communities, as well as low level access to the data and computations for advanced computational science users.