Nanoinformatics is a critical enabling area of nanotechnology that has important implications for both research and commercial developments of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs). The diverse and sustainable development of nanotechnology requires data acquisition, processing, management (collection, validation, storage and sharing), regarding the physicochemical properties of ENMs, their environmental fate and transport, bioactivity, and performance in various applications. Datasets from studies on ENMs are typically unstructured, heterogeneous and often lacking in metadata. Therefore, there is a need for data management that is flexible while providing seamless integration across platforms and modeling tools. Accordingly, in the present work a centralized and integrated database management system, NanoDatabank, was developed with a framework that provides for classification and storage of various ENMs relevant data types. NanoDatabank currently contains data sets on more than about 400 ENM types, 300 investigations regarding ENM toxicity (including metal oxides, quantum dots, CNTs and more) and 150 investigation regarding F&T and ENM characterization. NanoDatabank supports nanoinformatics tools/simulators by providing (a) accessibility to data sets by various simulators and data processing tools, (b) ability to upload raw data and perform various data processing functions, and (c) an intelligent datasets query system. NanoDatabank will be illustrated via recent examples demonstrating the benefit of direct dataset integration with nanoinformatics modeling and data processing tools. A unique feature of the NanoDatabank is a dynamically built taxonomy/ontology and storage ENM information/data with various data access/security levels to allow and promote safe data sharing and storage. In addition, reliability (i.e. clarity regarding exactly what is being reported and trustworthiness/reproducibility) and relevance (i.e. usefulness for a particular purpose) of information is stored in NanoDatabank as metadata along with compressed associated information. To address the issues of data sharing and integration, NanoDatabank uses a range of data converters/utilities to integrate the information among computational tools as part of nanoinformatics platform (nanoinfo.org) for various scenarios such as life cycle assessment of the release of nanomaterials, multimedia exposure analysis of ENMs, QSARs and data driven models for the evaluation of toxicity of ENMs.

Flexible database management system for nanoinformatics research and data integration

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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