Purpose: The European Radiobiology Archives (ERA), together with corresponding Japanese and American databases, hold data from nearly all experimental animal radiation biology studies carried out between 1960 and 1998, involving more than 300,000 animals. The Federal Office for Radiation Protection, together with the University of Cambridge have undertaken to transfer the existing ERA archive to a web-based database to maximize its usefulness to the scientific community and bring data coding and structure of this legacy database into congruence with currently accepted semantic standards for anatomy and pathology.
Methods: The accuracy of the primary data input was assessed and improved. The original rodent pathology nomenclature was recoded to replace the local 'DIS-ROD' (Disease Rodent) formalism with Mouse Pathology (MPATH) and Mouse Anatomy (MA) ontology terms. A pathology panel sampled histopathological slide material and compared the original diagnoses with currently accepted diagnostic criteria.
Results: The overall non-systematic error rate varied among the studies between 0.26% and 4.41%, the mean error being 1.71%. The errors found have been corrected and the studies thus controlled have been annotated. The majority of the original pathology terms have been successfully translated into a combination of MPATH and MA ontology terms.
Conclusions: ERA has the potential of becoming a world-wide radiobiological research tool for numerous applications, such as the re-analysis of existing data with new approaches in the light of new hypotheses and techniques, and using the database as an information resource for planning future animal studies. When the database is opened for new data it may be possible to offer long-term storage of data from recent and future animal studies.