The European Union has set ambitious goals in its Green Deal to fight important economical, health and environmental challenges like climate change, global pollution, and overreliance on scarce resources. To achieve these goals, new advanced materials and chemicals have to be introduced in all relevant innovation markets including but not limited to the health, energy, transportation, construction and packaging to replace substances, which are toxic and/or harmful to our environment, i.e. these new materials have to be Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD).
Seven Past Nine (7P9), a Slovenian-based SME, has taken on the challenge by putting together the PINK consortium to support industry by developing new digital tools to integrate safety and sustainability aspects in the decision process already at very early stages of material development. Its expertise is in the (i) development and implementation of information management and sharing solutions, (ii) developing concepts and tools for integration of software and data from many different sources based on the FAIR data and software principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable), and (iii) providing collaboration infrastructures and platforms. From the experience from different nanosafety and SSbD projects (NanoCommons, MACRAMÉ and BIO-SUSHY), it was clear that one of the major challenges of SSbD is to collect all the required data considering functionality, economic efficiency, safety and environmental and social sustainability for all life-cycle stages of the materials and along full value chains. Therefore, using a company completely devoted to technical and semantic interoperability, even a very small one, as the coordinator of the project made sense.
The team from 7P9 combines data warehouse development, web application development and user experience design with domain expertise in life science, toxicology, chem-, bio- and nanoinformatics.
Maja Brajnik (F) is a founding partner and an Information Architect and User Interface Designer. She has extensive web development experience having worked on more than 150 projects for different clients in various fields: research, education, government, industry and culture.
MSc Joh Dokler (M) is a founding partner and the CEO/CTO at 7P9. He is responsible for architecting and developing software solutions to support a wide array of scientific workflows and tools. This includes data modelling/management/processing as well as cloud- and web-based applications with streamlined APIs and GUIs.
Dr. Thomas Exner (M) is a founding partner and senior scientist. He is responsible for the scientific planning, execution, supervision and coordination of different projects in the area of Data Management and integrated testing strategy development for risk/safety assessment of chemicals, drugs and nanomaterials.
As coordinator, 7P9 is involved in all parts of PINK and in charge of guaranteeing the smooth progress of the project. However, we want to focus here on one specific aspect, which makes PINK unique. The project is committed to providing advanced digital approaches based on open science and FAIR principles contributing to establishing a European chemicals and materials data, modelling and software ecosystem and encouraging uptake of these approaches outside the project with intensive knowledge transfer through collaboration and exploiting synergies. Together with our partners SINTEF, University of Birmingham, Karolinska Institute and Novamechanics, a Technical and Semantic Interoperability Framework will be proposed and implemented in PINK to provide data and tools to the PINKISH decision support platform but, perhaps even more importantly, to provide a prototype demonstrating how this improved interoperability will bring multiple domains and their data and tools into one harmonised system. Harmonisation and alignment of different ontologies will be crucial for allowing communication across these various domains and PINK will address this challenge together with its sister projects as well as large European initiatives like ELIXIR, PARC and the new partnership IAM4EU.
