Design Concept for the Knowledge Warehouse (Deliverable 4.1)

The ACEnano knowledge warehouse concept envisions provision of services for data management arranged around a data warehouse storing all experimental data of the project and also acting as a central repository for data in the area of NMs physicochemical characterization, as well as exposure,  fate and hazard data coming from other projects. The data warehouse will be interlinked with the protocols database, providing a structured approach for documenting the experimental procedures, and will be complemented with a portal providing interfaces for data and protocol upload, browsing, searching and download as well as the user management. Flexible data formats will be used, to allow for the collection of data from very different experiments, and interoperability will be improved by semantic annotation of the data as well as the data format. In this way, the data can be presented to the data user in an optimized form for the specific application at hand, e.g. it could be converted into a format expected as input for a specific analysis, visualization or modelling software. Finally, the KW and KI will support community activities of the project and later by the entire nano safety community and stakeholders (industry, regulators etc.) in the form of the knowledge sharing tool, which can be used to give feedback and discuss protocols under development and temporary experimental and modelling data, as well as documenting the results of the round robins and the steps to improve interlaboratory reproducibility.