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Expansion and Refinement of Chemical Use Data for Characterizing Exposure Pathways
Citation:
Handa, S., T. Wall, K. Isaacs, A. Larger, B. Horton, D. Lyons, AND K. Dionisio. Expansion and Refinement of Chemical Use Data for Characterizing Exposure Pathways. Society of Toxicology Annual Meeting, Virtual, N/A, N/A, March 12 - 26, 2021. https://doi.org/10.23645/epacomptox.15075087
Impact/Purpose:
ChemExpoDB is an integrated family of exposure databases, linking data across multiple different exposure data streams. The software application Factotum was developed to assist with managing, curating, and ensuring the quality of the data within ChemExpoDB. Factotum has facilitated the rapid collection and curation of chemical use data to improve the volume, quality and accessibility of exposure related data for decision making by EPA Stakeholders. To date, Factotum has been used to upload more than 500,000 publicly available data documents, with 3.9 million chemical-specific records extracted from these documents. Presently, 2.0 million of these raw chemical records have been curated to harmonized substance identifiers (DTXSIDs). Recent efforts have expanded chemical use data streams to include the addition of new data types related to occupational exposure (1304 documents with 5421 raw chemical records to date), consumer product use patterns (202 documents), and chemical occurrence in environmental media (1175 documents with 2195 raw chemical records). These expanded use data are being integrated with other exposure-relevant data streams (e.g., MMDB, release data) to rapidly inform exposure screening workflows addressing various exposure pathways.
Description:
The US EPA is responsible for evaluating thousands of chemicals for the potential risks they may pose to humans and ecosystems, which necessitates information on hazard and exposure potential for each chemical. To support chemical decision-making, EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD) must identify and characterize relevant exposure pathways - the path of a chemical from source to a receptor. How a chemical is used (e.g. in a consumer, occupational, or industrial context) is critical to determining exposure pathways. ORD has developed a data management and curation application, called Factotum, which facilitates the rapid collection and distribution of high-quality chemical and exposure related data from public documents via curation, quality assurance, visualization and data delivery tools. Within Factotum, there has been a significant focus on chemical composition of consumer products, functional role of chemicals within products and processes, and presence of chemicals on reported specific or general use lists. Factotum has facilitated the expansion of these use databases to include new information related to occupational use of chemicals, literature measurement of chemicals in key media, and population use patterns for consumer products. Factotum also includes new category schema for the classification of products used in industrial and occupational settings. Ongoing efforts are made to broaden the scope of the data while ensuring data quality, through the addition of new data sources, data curation and cleaning, manual Quality Assurance (QA) workflows, and chemical curation to harmonized chemical identifiers. To date, Factotum has been used to collect and curate data from 511,898 documents, representing over 3.9 million individual chemical records and 29,391 unique chemical substances. These methods have rapidly expanded the scope and quantity of data in EPA's Chemicals and Products Database (CPDat). These expanded use data are being integrated with other exposure-relevant data streams, including chemical monitoring and release data, to rapidly inform EPA and State agencies workflows for assessing potential exposures via different pathways. This poster does not necessarily reflect EPA policy. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute endorsement or recommendation for use.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Expansion and Refinement of Chemical Use Data for Characterizing Exposure Pathways
SOT POSTER HANDA.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 1799.013 KB, about PDF)