🔢Quality Score

Quality Score (QS) is a KPI used to assess the reliability of effect factors (EF) provided by OpenChemFacts.

This metric is derived from the EF3.1 European Commission framework which has defined such metric (cf. this paper from JRC team).

A quality score is assigned to the effect factor (EF) of each chemical so that users can appreciate the reliability of data.

Three criteria are used :

• number of species available,

• number of taxonomic groups,

• number of data extrapolated

Interpretation

Citation from the JRC paper :

"The logarithmic function is selected because it allows reducing the relevance of large numbers (e.g. lots of species available or taxonomic groups) on the QS. Three taxonomic groups (algae, crustaceans and fish) and five different species are necessary to guarantee ecological realism. Once these criteria for these parameters are met, it is less important “how much” such criteria are satisfied, hence a higher number of species or taxonomic groups would have a relative small influence on the QS. The contribution of the extrapolation has a lower relevance on the QS compared to number of species and taxonomic groups. The 0.1 exponent was arbitrarily chosen to produce a decreasing curve not strongly penalising results with high number of extrapolations since extrapolated data might be anyway considered of good quality."

The final numerical score is then converted to a Low / Intermediate / High quality criteria.

Thresholds