Welcome to Opasnet

What is Opasnet?

Opasnet is a wiki-based website for supporting decisions about human health, and environmental factors affecting it. The website collects, synthesizes, and communicates people's values and scientific information. We believe that all wise decision-making is based on expressing our values about what the really important things are, and understanding how the decision actually affects those things. This is why we need both values and science.

Opasnet is hosted by THL (National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland). The Department of Environmental Health has a motto:

Man must be able to breathe, drink, eat and live in the environment trusting on its safety. This is both an individual's civil right and a prerequisite for a functioning society and economy.

This is a major challenge. Firstly, we must try to ensure that the environment is safe in general. Secondly, we must provide the people the means to avoiding things in the environment that put their health at risk. Thirdly, we must be alert and try to identify emerging hazards and be prepared when needed. Finally, when all this has been done, we must also manage to communicate to the people that they do not need to worry.

By means of this website, we hope to provide understanding on and guidance for environmental health issues and decision making regarding them. The issues are usually very complex and they tend to cross administrative, geographical, and scientific boundaries. Therefore we need information and contributions from many different disciplines and areas of societal action. This website is built in a way that hopefully makes it easy for anyone to add their information and values. It is also built in a way that attempts to mimic the real world. The pages describe things that are usually real, measurable quantities. And if something affects something else, these two things should also be linked in this website. It is a challenging task to describe even the most crucial things affecting human health, but that is what this website aims to do. We have started this work by carrying out practical case studies in order to make this effort somewhat manageable.

How does Opasnet function?

Probably the most obvious point of comparison to Opasnet is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Both of them are web-based information storages and workspaces building on the idea of open mass collaboration. The main difference between Opasnet and Wikipedia is that, whereas the Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, i.e. a relatively freely formatted information repository of any topic for any purpose, the purpose of Opasnet is to provide information to support decision making by means of systematic analysis. Due to this difference, both the information within Opasnet and the use of Opasnet is somewhat more structured. For a more detailed comparison between Opasnet and Wikipedia as well as more information about the structure of Opasnet, see a separate page that explains Opasnet in more detail.

There are several possible ways of making use of Opasnet:

1. Read Opasnet. Browse through the pages and obtain information of your interest. A good way to get started is by following the links on Main Page. Another efficient way of getting acquainted with the information content is to have a look at the categories and pages belonging to different categories by following the Main category link in the navigation toolbar on the left hand side. One can also make word searches using the search text box in the navigation toolbar on the left. Opasnet is in the open internet and reading Opasnet is unlimited.
2. Comment Opasnet content. Every page in Opasnet has a corresponding discussion page. In order to be able to write to Opasnet, one needs to be registered and logged in. Create an account and click the discussion link on top of the particular page whose content you wish to comment. Then click the edit link on top of the discussion page and write your comment in the edit window. See help pages for guidance on writing to Opasnet. Opasnet recommends a formal argumentation format for discussions, but also freely formatted comments are acceptable, but be aware that your comment may be transformed into a formal argumentation structure by some other user.
3. Edit Opasnet pages. When logged in, also the actual content pages become editable. Note that it is often recommended to write down comments on the discussion page before proceeding to edit the page itself. However if you are convinced that you know what you are doing, please go ahead and make your edits. Opasnet records a complete version history of all pages so no need to be too worried about causing any irreversible harm.
4. Create new pages to Opasnet. In the navigation toolbar in the left, there is a create new pages link that takes to a page where a name of a new page can be given and an object-type category can be chosen for the page. It is recommended that before proceeding to create new pages, one becomes sufficiently acquainted with the and their uses in Opasnet as well as the principles and methods of open assessment.
5. Use the information created in and obtained from Opasnet. The purpose of Opasnet is to provide support to decision making and thereby guide actions.