Nano Technology Community Outreach

Description of Tasks

1) Requirements Analysis
2) Definition of personas and use cases
3) Systems Design
4) User Testing and Evaluation
5) Integration of data and analysis resources with experimental design (collaborative trials with cluster
members)
6) Meta-Analysis (collaborative trial with cross-cluster participation)
7) Provision of User Guidance (on data input, access to data, tool use, experimental design, model building)
8) Scientific Coordination, Evaluation, Improvement
9) Evaluation and Sustainability

 

Nano Technology Community Outreach

DELIVERABLE REPORTS

D1.1 Requirements Analysis and Systems Design
D1.2 Use Cases and Test Suite
D1.3 Sustainability Plan
D1.4 User Guidance
D1.5 Evaluation

WORK PACKAGE LEADER

Maastricht University

Objectives

This WP deals with the communication between our project and the wider nanotechnology community. It establishes various mechanisms we use to ensure collaboration with and feedback on our project. The goals are to collaboratively develop interoperability documents together with definitions of personas and use cases that capture the community needs and working practices. Analysis of these requirements results in a global systems design, detailed descriptions of typical use cases, and a series of standardized test cases by which the system implementation can be tested. A major objective too is the development of a sustainability plan, capturing the current and future needs of the community and how they will be met.

Description of work

Key to the development of an agreed ontology is getting a community agreement. The nanotechnology community, however, is large and diverse. This WP will capture the user needs and continuously interact and collaborate with the community to ensure it has a clear input into the ontology and data platform under development.

The nanotechnology community stakeholders have in common the key idea of the need of safe-by-design for ENMs; however, the nanotechnology market is also characterized by a large diversity of needs: regulatory, applicationdriven, and safety-driven requirements. Each aspect of ENMs comes with its own set of expectations for an ontology and a data warehouse. The requirements for the regulatory description of ENMs are unlike those needed for nanoQSAR analyses. Safety requirements may also be different under different conditions: nanosafety has a different meaning for an ENM when used as a vehicle for drug delivery in life-threatening diseases cf. when it is used for its beneficial properties in the construction industry.

It is a daunting task to develop an agreed ontology to capture and align all these needs. Key to this is communication and close collaboration, which provide strong reasons to have a dedicated WP to guide this interaction within the community. We will therefore interact with key organizations in the NanoSafety community as well as those external stakeholders who can make valuable contributions, e.g., on harmonisation. Effective incorporation of ontology into resources and applications will require a clear development structure, as outlined in the other WPs. Coordination of technical development and testing will be coordinated by a project Chief Technical Officer (CTO), who will organise internally the various knowledge flows on requirement analysis, technical information, issues and changes made to systems. The CTO will coordinate collaboration of the various WPs with each other and the community, organized in weekly one-hour virtual meetings, and regular use of mailing list, task, bug and feature tracking systems (see WP5), public standards and matching consultation rounds, etc.