How it works
How it works Emerging issues are food safety or food quality related events, that are likely to become potential health and/or economical risks in the future. Multiple timelines exist regarding emerging issues. The short (early warning systems), medium (emerging risk identification) and long-term (foresight) problems need a system of inter-connected solutions.
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EMERGING ISSUE IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM
We cover all three timelines: the short (early warning systems), medium (emerging risk identification) and long-term (foresight) pillars. The main inputs of the emerging issue identification system are various knowledge-based data and information sources.
Rapid alert systems (mainly RASFF, INFOSAN)
News (with global coverage)
Social media news aggregating services
Sample and control data from European food safety authorities
Patent databases (WIPO, EPO, USPTO)
Scientific publication databases (PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct, Web of Science, CAB Abstracts, FSTA Abstracts)
Collecting expert knowledge
From these sources, different data analytical methods are used for identification of emerging risks, such as text mining (e.g., topic detection, keyword-based analysis, ontology-based analysis) and network analysis (e.g., co-citation network analysis, co-occurrence analysis, structural hole analysis).
EXAMPLES OF DATA ANALYTICAL METHODOLOGIES USED BY OUR TEAM
TEXT MINING AND TOPIC DETECTION OF SAFETY NEWS
As an advanced data analytical tool, text mining helps us to categorize and analyse food related news and thereby identify relevant trending topics in a timely manner.
Identification of the patterns in food safety related events, like food safety outbreaks, new consumer trends, is our most efficient tool in identifying emerging risks.
NETWORK ANALYSIS OF PATENT DATABASE
Evaluation of patent databases supports our system by identifying emerging/influential technological innovations, which might be accompanied by new risks entering the food chain.
For example, a trending innovation area of toys and occupying materials in animal husbandry, as a poorly regulated area, might threaten animal health (and indirectly human health as well) by chemical, microbiological and physical risks.
RISK PREDICTION
Based on the emerging issue identification system, it is possible to identify changes in long-term trends and drivers, upcoming medium-term possible issues, notifications on outbreaks and cases of already known risks and also changes in indicators related to known risks.
With all those identified issues, a set of predictions could be built up, which would inform the risk mitigation decision making process. The risk prediction capacity could be seen as a complex set of various emerging issue identification processes and their outcomes, with an ultimate objective of finding the most important risks to be prepared for.
The emerging issue signals detected by our system will have different risk prediction outputs informing the decision makers of the organisation, at different levels, in different ways, generating different possible actions. The different emerging issue identification processes influence each other in a complex way, enabling a systematic risk prediction, multiple timeline preparedness and risk mitigation.