Development of a modular open source risk assessment KNIME extension

Risk assessment (RA) is an important element of the food safety and public health risk analysis process. For microbial risk assessments (MRA) there are several guidelines on how to conduct them, but these do not contain technical specifications on exchange formats for models and simulation scenarios. As a consequence software tools available for creation and application of MRA models currently do not share any common “language” thus making direct exchange of information between those tools impossible. In addition, this insufficiency hampers the development of community-driven MRA model repositories which could be exploited by different independent software solutions. Here, we describe the newly developed Food Safety Knowledge (FSK) framework which provides for the first time flexible data formats (FSK-ML) and rules for standardised annotation of MRA models and simulation scenarios. Further, we describe the first FSK reference implementation extending the open source software framework KNIME. It facilitates the generation and application of re-useable MRA models and model components.