The NanoCommons Work Package (WP) structure is divided into 3 strongly interlinked categories:
- Networking Activities
- Joint Research Activities
- Transnational Access Activities
1. Networking Activities
The NanoCommons networking activities (NA 1 – 5) will focus on liaising with all potential stakeholders (academia, industry, regulatory), identify their needs, the existing gaps in data tools and management. The NA WPs will also ensure the project’s alignment with other EU funded consortia efforts to ensure cross-project collaboration and continuity.
Besides documenting the stakeholders that are most likely to use and benefit from NanoCommons, the project aims to create training certification programs that will provide interested users with the necessary skills needed from the nanotechnology and data management industry (e.g. data curation). Different types of tools (Massive Open Online Courses, e-learning platforms, microlearning, etc.) are envisioned to address the training needs of the key groups. The platform will be complemented with documentation and training material for the workflows and computation tools including online video tutorials that will be generated throughout the project describing the virtual environment, the discovery service, integrated services and the combination of services to workflows.
NanoCommons is foreseen to be an infrastructure for all, however, sustainability will depend on how to bring in the resources to run this infrastructure.
2. Joint Research Activities
One major issue limiting the success of new approaches in risk assessment is the quality of the data. Therefore, a suite of tools for performing quality control analyses and data (pre)processing will be made available in NanoCommons. Additionally, we plan to integrate tools for manual curation of datasets. These will then be stored (similar to the pre-reasoned datasets) in the original databases as a new version of the dataset or in other NanoCommons-compliant databases with a link to the original source. Following a similar strategy quality assurance will be included in the processing, analysis and modelling tools.