Testing the JRC TIM Tools to identify emerging chemical risks

Identification of emerging risks in food and feed is a legal obligation for EFSA. Horizon scanning of large data sets can give a useful contribution to this mission. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) has developed two data intelligence tools: Medisys for real‐time news analysis of medical and health related topics and TIM Technology for data analytics and knowledge extraction from scientific publications, patents, EU projects, etc. None has been evaluated for its capability to identify emerging chemicals in the food chain in the EU. Both tools were customized and tested in a first phase of two years to test their efficiency and relevancy for this purpose. A screening workflow has been set‐up to identify relevant hits. Key words and search strings have been defined, achieving a good compromise between retrieval of useful documents and false positives. Relevant results will be evaluated and validated in collaboration with the EFSA Working Group on emerging chemical risks identification and the Emerging Risks Exchange Network (EREN).