PHIN VADS Vocabulary Service Application in Environmental Public Health Tracking

The Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) Network (Tracking Network) will integrate environmental hazards, human exposure and health effects data into one nationwide network that will provide information on the possible relationships between environmental exposures and adverse health effects.

 

A key component of the Tracking Network is descriptive metadata, which will advance the searching and discovery of data, and also provide pertinent information on a dataset’s purpose, use and distribution. The Tracking Network’s metadata sub-group chose the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Content Standard for Geospatial Metadata for describing datasets on the Tracking Network. The sub-group collaborated with Northrop Grumman on the development of a web-based metadata creation tool modeled on the FGDC standard, which will enable the Tracking Network local and state grantees to create metadata for the datasets that they will make available on the network. Using a metadata standard provides a uniform way of describing data resources on the Tracking Network and therefore provides a standard way of searching for data. One important metadata element that will facilitate searching for data is the Theme Keyword element. The metadata creation tool will interface with the PHIN VADS vocabulary service to enable the use of health and environmental standard vocabularies to validate and populate the entries into the keywords element.

 

The metadata creator will use the EPHT metadata creation tool to make real time calls to PHIN VADS via an application interface, to select a code set from the list of PHIN vocabulary objects. The interface will then validate code and code name entries to populate the Theme Keywords element. The interface will also allow grantees centralized access to all the terminology needed to describe their datasets.  Future possibilities include local instantiations of the VADS database and service layer, offering greater local determination of performance and access patterns.