Scope Statement

Interconnected, freely communicating and agreed information systems are urgently needed for collating (a) nanoscale material descriptions; (b) their intrinsic and context-dependent properties and their effects, including environmental and  health-related; and (c) their interactions with biological entities. The goal of the US-EU Nanotechnology Databases and Ontology Community of Research (CoR) is to enable the sharing, searching, and analysis of nanoscale material characterization data across a wide range of active and archived experimental sources and to give advice on how to structure these data to enable their widest possible use. Achievement of this goal will deliver important new capabilities to (1) allow integration of pertinent risk assessment data among labs to (2) provide situational awareness of data coverage across nanomaterial categories, and to (3) enable predictive computational models for bridging physical properties and biological outcomes with exposure, dispersal and fate.  In order to realize this goal, the Community of Research will initially focus on the following three areas of investigation:

• Identification of the data elements necessary to establish common data-sharing model(s) for this domain.
• Specification of requirements for sharing data between research groups and repositories in human- and machine-interpretable forms
• Definition of concepts necessary to support the above activities and representation of those concepts in an ontological framework. This will include characterizers for the material itself as well as descriptors for its interaction with the environment and elements to characterize intermediate effects in adverse outcome pathways.

Through these activities the CoR will provide tools for improving the overall quality of experimental data being generated in the research communities in the EU and US.