The WORKSAFE project aimed at improving access to and use of the large amount of data related to the broad sector of health protection of workers and workplace safety and available in many European public sector organisations, including research institutes, public health institutions and hospitals.

THE PROJECT

The actions undertaken by WORKSAFE were in line with main principles for the development of public health policy within the EU, particularly as regards the selected target sector: workplace risks and protection as far as cancer and degenerative diseases are concerned.

The high risks of activities involving the use of toxic and noxious substances have been studied for long time. Much information about this subject has been collected throughout Europe by EU and National public institutions. Based on this background knowledge, the WORKSAFE project defined a suitable pan-European meta-data and information models and management services to allow semantic-based access and exploitation of existing information sources and data collections in several EU countries.

This activity required the analysis of different national standards and formats performed with the cooperation of several research centres and the IT experts participating in the project.

The partners discusses and solved organisational, institutional and administrative problems and barriers for using the data, including copyrights issues. A web-based infrastructure was designed and implemented to allow inter-networking of content providers and content users, the exploitation of content potentials, the demonstration of public access and sharing of distributed data collections.

The web based infrastructure allowed knowledge sharing on top of a meta-data model specifically defined and was the basis for a set of network services which supported the actual diffusion and exploitation of contents among the different providers and end-users.

CONSORTIUM

A consolidated research group with a renowned academic and industrial profile.

• algoWatt SpA
• IST – Istituto Nazionale per la Ricerca sul Cancro (IT)
• Karolinska Institutet (SE)
• Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (FI)
• Fundacion Robotiker (ES)
• International Agency for Research on Cancer (Subcontractor of IST)