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| <accesscontrol>Members of projects,,Workshop2008,,beneris,,Erac,,Heimtsa,,Hiwate,,Intarese</accesscontrol>
| | #REDIRECT [[:heande:Information structure of Open Assessment]] |
| [[Category:Manuscript]] | |
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| This is a manuscript about the information structure of Open Assessment.
| | [[Category:Open assessment]][[category:nuggets]][[category:manuscript]] |
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| '''Information structure of open assessment
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| Jouni T. Tuomisto<sup>1</sup>, Mikko Pohjola<sup>1</sup>, Alexandra Kuhn<sup>2</sup>
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| <sup>1</sup>National Public Health Institute, P.O.Box 95, FI-70701 Kuopio, Finland
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| <sup>2</sup>IER, Universitaet Stuttgart, Hessbruehlstr. 49 a, 70565 Stuttgart, Germany
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| == Abstract ==
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| === Background ===
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| === Methods ===
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| === Results ===
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| === Conclusions ===
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| == Background ==
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| Many future environmental health problems are global, cross administrative boundaries, and are caused by everyday activities of billions of people. Urban air pollution or climate change are typical problems of this kind. The traditional risk assessment procedures, developed for single-chemical, single-decision-maker, pre-market decisions do not perform well with the new challenges. There is an urgent need to develop new assessment methods that could deal with the new fuzzy but far-reaching and severe problems<ref>Briggs et al (2008) Manuscript. </ref>.
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| A major need is for a systematic approach that is not limited to any particular kind of situation (such as chemical marketing), and is specifically designed to offer guidance for decision-making. Our main interest is in societal decision-making related to environmental health, formulated into the following research question: '''How can scientific information and value judgements be organised for improving societal decision-making in a situation where open participation is allowed?
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| As the question shows, we find it important that the approach to be developed covers wider domains than environmental health. In addition, the approach should be flexible enough to subsume the wide range of current methods that are designed for specific needs within the overall assessment process. Examples of such methods are source-apportionment of exposures, genotoxicity testing, Monte Carlo simulation, or elicitation of expert judgement. As openness is one of the starting points for method development, we call the new kinds of assessments '''open assessments'''. Practical lessons about openness have been described in another paper<ref>Tuomisto et al. (2008) [[:intarese:Manuscript:Open participation in risk assessment|Open participation in the environmental health risk assessment]]. Submitted</ref>
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| In another paper from our group, we identified three main properties that the new assessment method should fulfil <ref>Pohjola and Tuomisto. (2008) [[Purpose determines the structure of environmental health assessments]]. Manuscript.</ref>. These are the following: 1) The whole assessment work and a subsequent report are open to critical evaluation by anyone interested at any point during the work; 2) all data and all methods must be falsifiable and they are subject to scientific criticism, and 3) all parts of one assessment must be reusable in other assessments.
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| In this study, we developed an information structure that fulfils all the three criteria. Specifically, we attempted to answer the following question: '''What are the object types needed and the structures of these objects such that the three criteria of openness, falsifiability, and reusability are fulfilled; the resulting structure can be used in practical assessment; and the assessment can be operationalised using modern computer technology?
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| [[Image:Context Process and product.PNG|center|Figure 1. An assessment consists of the making of it and an end product, usually a report. The assessment is bound and structured by its context. Main parts of the context are the scientific context (methods and paradigms available), the policy context (the decision situation for which the information is needed), and the use process (the actual decision-making process where the assessment report is used).]]
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| == Methods ==
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| The work is based on research questions. The current answers to these questions should be seen as hypotheses that will be tested against observations and practical experience as the work goes on. The research questions are presented in the Results section together with the current answer.
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| The scientific methods that have been used as the foundation of this work are briefly presented here.
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| * [[PSSP]]
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| * [[Bayesian network]], causality
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| * [[Bayes' theorem]]
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| * [[Falsification]], bayesian updating
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| * [[Decision theory]]
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| * [[pyrkilo]]
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| * [[open assessment]]
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| * [[:en:Pragma-dialectics|argumentation theory]]
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| Three requirements were applied throughout the method development:
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| * possibility to open participation at any point in the assessment work
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| * falsifiability (testable against observations)
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| * reusable objects
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| == Results ==
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| ===Universal products===
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| {{{{ns:0}}:Universal products}}
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| ===Structure of an attribute===
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| {{{{ns:0}}:Attribute}}
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| ===Structure of an assessment product===
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| {{{{ns:0}}:Assessment}}
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| ===Structure of a variable===
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| {{{{ns:0}}:Variable}}
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| ===Structure of a discussion ===
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| {{{{ns:0}}:Discussion}}
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| * parts of discussion (hierarchy does NOT show temporal issues but targets of arguments)
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| * (parts of argument?)
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| ===Structure of a method===
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| {{{{ns:0}}:Method}}
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| * [[Model]], [[Tool]] (what is the difference between the two?)
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| ===Structure of a class===
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| {{{{ns:0}}:Class}}
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| ===Objects in different abstraction levels===
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| * Abstraction level (not written down?)
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| ===Performance in the information structure===
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| * Performance, including uncertainty [[Evaluating assessment performance]], [[Assessing uncertainty]], [[Quality assurance and quality control]], [[Purpose and properties of good assessments]]
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| == Conclusions ==
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| == Competing interests ==
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| == Authors' contributions ==
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| == Acknowledgements ==
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| == References ==
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| <references/>
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| == Figures ==
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| [[Image:Context Process and product.PNG]]
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| [[image:Variable definition.PNG]] | |
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| == Tables ==
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| == Additional files ==
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