Exploitation of Commercial B2B Data for Risk Assessment Tasks in Foodborne Crisis Events

In foodborne crisis events timely and scientifically sound risk assessments are of utmost relevance for all stakeholders. Risk assessments serve as guidance for governmental and private sector crisis management and affect international trade relationships as well. Therefore it is necessary to continuously explore data sources and data analysis technologies which support the risk assessment process. This research analyses whether B2B data in combination with an open-source data analysis platform can contribute to risk assessment tasks. Specifically it is shown that commercial data from retail tracking services can be used to explore spatial and temporal distribution properties of products and generate hypotheses on possible contamination sources. Equally important, the developed data analytics workflows can help to decide which food product (group) is unlikely to be the source of the crisis. To make these resources available internationally it is planed to integrate these functionalities into the Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) project ( www.eclipse.org/stem ).