Open assessment method

Open risk assessment (ORA) is a description of a certain risk. It has been produced in the internet using a process where stakeholders and other people have been able to participate. They have been given an opportunity to comment and edit its contents already from an early phase of the process.

Structure of an ORA

Variables

Variables are the basic building blocks of an ORA. They describe some real-world things such as emissions of a pollutant, number of health effects due to a certain exposure in a population, or costs of a policy intervention. Variables are connected to each other with links that indicate a causal connection. The variables and the links together form a causal diagram that is the skeleton of an ORA.

Some variables have a special meaning or purpose. Indicators are outcome variables that are the main interest of the ORA, i.e. their values are the actual result of the ORA. Policy options are variables that describe a group of possible actions such as installing (or not installing) a filter to the end of a smoke stack. All other variables are basically needed to estimate, how the policy options considered will affect the indicators. This information is then used in the subsequent decision-making.

Categories

Categories are used to manage the variables. Each variable can belong to one or more categories. Each category can also belong to one or more categories that are more general the itself. As an example, a variable Fine particle concentration in Helsinki belongs to a category Fine particles, which belongs to a category Air pollutants. Categories are used in the same way as in Wikipedia. However, there some specific categories that should be used systematically to categorise variables ORAs. Each variable shold belong to one of these categories, or their subcategories. The main categories are described below.

• Activities describe any human activity that result in releases of pollutants or other hazards into the environment.
• Releases describe releases of pollutants or other hazards into the environment.
• Pollutants describe what the pollutants or other hazards are. All variables that relate to a particular pollutant should be indexed with the category of that pollutant, and that category should be indexed to Pollutants.
• Concentrations in the environment describe
• Exposures
• Health effects exposure-reponse functions and health effects in humans.
• Costs and valuations describes value-laden summaries of health and other effects.

Open assessment quiz

Open assessment quiz is a way to find out, how much you actually know about the open assessment or the pyrkilo method. Some basic knowledge is needed to be able to effectively edit pages. Everyone can still contribute by providing data or information, or commenting any existing content. However, if you do not know anything about the method that is applied in these pages, we recommend that you wrap your contributions inside a comment (the button with a thin blue line, above the edit window). You can also start by using the contribution tool as soon as we get it running.

Select the correct answers for the questions below and send them via email to jouni.tuomisto(at)ktl.fi. You will get your score and right answers as reply.

True or false?

1. Open assessment is called open because the results are openly available.
2. All open assessments consist of variables.
3. The result of a variable is always numerical.
4. The attributes of a variable are name, scope, data, and result.
5. Open assessment is the same thing as a risk assessment.
6. Cause-effect relations form the basic structure of an open assessment.
7. Assessments and variables are product objects.
8. Classes are process objects.
9. Classes are particular kinds of sets, in which all the items share some explicitly defined properties.
10. NOAEL (no observed adverse effect level) of a particular chemical can be defined as a variable.
11. NOAEL has a causal relation to the reference dose (RfD) of the chemical.
12. NOAEL has a causal relation to the health effects of the chemical.
13. All you need to know to calculate the result of a variable is the information described in the definition attribute of the same variable.
14. The result cannot be a single number, it is always a distribution.
15. Health impact assessment and risk assessment are process objects.
16. A process object does have a result attribute, and the result is always a universal product object.
17. Any particular piece of reality is always described as a variable.
18. The clairvoyant test examines whether a scope is clear enough.
19. If several variables contain the definition of PM_2.5, you can create a class from the definition.
20. When starting an open assessment, the first thing is to define the purpose of the assessment.
21. Anyone can participate in a properly open assessment.
22. A variable cannot connect to the data attribute of another variable, but only to the causality attribute.
23. Causality attribute only contains the list of parent variables. It does not contain data about the causalities; this data belongs to the data attribute.
24. References is also an attribute.
25. The scope of a variable in your assessment is called "persistent organic pollutant concentrations in adults in Finland", and someone adds data about DDT into the variable. You are allowed to prevent that because its your assessment.
26. You are allowed to prevent that because the variable is about dioxin, not DDT.
27. You are not allowed to prevent that, but you can start a discussion against the addition.
28. You are likely to win, because you can use the practical argument that such a change into this critical variable would make it incoherent in your assessment, and several other assessments as well.
29. You must use your real name when making contributions to open assessments.
30. When an assessment is finished, the assessment and its variables are fixed and no further edits are allowed.