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Improve CompTox Chemicals Dashboard User Experience
Citation:
Singh, A. Improve CompTox Chemicals Dashboard User Experience. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
EPA CompTox Chemicals Dashboard was released in August 2016 to provide public access to chemical data. Since the initial launch, there have been 10 releases updating the Dashboard. Building on the initial release and technology platform used, the Dashboard has become a one-stop shop for chemistry, toxicity and exposure information for over 900,000 chemicals, with over 300 individual chemical lists. The available data includes bioactivity data from the ToxCast and Tox21 projects, exposure data associated with the ExpoCast program and toxicity data. The Dashboard may be searched by chemical identifiers, consumer product categories, and assays/genes associated with high-throughput screening data. Dashboard information can be used to inform chemical screening and prioritization decisions and can be used to inform data extrapolations using read-across approaches. The Dashboard provides unique capabilities to the community including real time prediction of physicochemical properties and toxicological endpoints, batch searching for thousands of chemicals at a time, and advanced searching approaches to support non-targeted screening mass spectrometry research effort. In September 2019, EPA began updating the architecture of the Dashboard. The functionality, applications and data sources added to the Dashboard since its release in 2016 necessitated a significant update of the underlying software architecture to provide a fresh foundation to add new functionality, refresh data on a more frequent schedule, and provide greater performance In October 2021, EPA released an update to the CompTox Chemicals Dashboard with the new architecture and it is a complete rebuild using a modern data and software approaches. With the 2021 release, the rebuilt application has many user interface enhancements to improve interactivity with the data. This includes the adoption of flexible table elements to make searching and navigating within the data more facile, a full redesign of the bioactivity data visualization and batch search interfaces, and the separation of certain aspects of the Dashboard into their own modules, specifically the read-across module (GenRA) and the PubMed Abstract Sifter. The most significant improvements which will provide the greatest benefit to the longevity of the online application and new tools in development, is the implementation of a datahub to manage the data and the development of a rich application programming interface (API). Both the datahub and API will support the development of multiple other software applications and, ultimately, will be publicly available for the community to programmatically access the chemical data. The new Dashboard release, formally labeled as our Version 4 release, is based on the new architecture and includes expansion of data for over 900k chemicals, new bioactivity and toxicity data and new and updated lists of chemicals associated with specific categories of chemicals and research efforts. This first release of the new architecture will be followed by regular updates to the data over the next few months as our ongoing work to assemble and curate new data continues unabated. In the coming months we intend to unveil a new training program associated with the dashboard to help guide the community in how to use the new application.
Description:
EPA Releases new CompTox Chemicals Dashoard – The result of a two-year project to update the online tool's information technology architecture. New release maintains the established navigation users are accustomed to and enhances the user experience by implementing new elements into the interface. For example: The handling of tabular data and interaction with bioactivity data and batch searching. Separation of the GenRA read-across module that can now be accessed independently of the Dashboard and is enhanced on its own development schedule Expansion of data sets across all data sources – number of chemicals and updated chemical lists, expansion of bioactivity, toxicity and exposure data