A key deliverable of workpackage 1.8 is to report on testing value documentation, including quality assessment of data. Compilers have been allocated time and funding for value documentation during months 24-36 and the target is to begin documenting data in October 2007.

The initiative is lead by Mark Roe, IFR, to whom all correspondence concerning this issue should be addressed.

The quality assessment system and - to a much lesser extent - value documentation are still under development but are now at a stage where they need to be tested.

Seven papers are selected to be used for testing value documentation:

Ekholm et al - Changes in the mineral and trace element contents of cereals, fruits and vegetables in Finland

Purchas et al  -  Concentrations of vitamin D3 and 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 in raw and cooked New Zealand beef and lamb

Barclay et al - Selenium Content of a Range of UK Foods

Murcovic  -  Carotenoid Content in Different Varieties of Pumpkins

Wall  -  Ascorbic acid, vitamin A, and mineral composition of banana (Musa sp.) and papaya (Carica papaya) cultivars grown in Hawaii

Heinemann - Comparative study of nutrient composition of commercial brown, parboiled and milled rice from Brazil

Bragagnolo & Rodriguez-Amaya - Comparison of the cholesterol content of Brazilian chicken and quail eggs

A description of the quality assessment system is available as is also an Excel spreadsheet for recording documentation.

The spreadsheet has separate worksheets for each of the 8 data sources (7 papers + website product label) and for each data source there is a worksheet for value documentation and another worksheet for quality assessment recording. For each data source, there is one food/component pair to be tested and that is given at the top of each worksheet.

The value documentation worksheets contain the fields as described in the technical annex. There have been some changes since the compiler network meeting in Paris (March 2007) and you will need to refer to the latest version which can be found here.

There are areas that may be difficult but the object of the exercise is to find out what works and what doesn’t rather than produce the ‘ideal’ value documentation/QA dataset. The QA system is now very similar to that being used by BASIS in WP2.4 and we know that there are still difficulties but hopefully this exercise will enable us to identify the problems and resolve them. The analytical methods section of quality assessment refers to guidelines describing ‘appropriate’ methods for each component, however we do not have those guidelines yet so please assume that the methods described are appropriate. I’ve documented some of the papers myself and I realise that it can be quite challenging to interpret some of the information given. Data sources are not described in a consistent way but we need to be able to document the information provided and the QA system needs to be flexible enough to allow assessment of the full range. The QA system is really intended for scientific literature and analytical reports but I’ve included data from a typical product label to assess whether or not we may be able to apply QA to product information as well.

Two additional papers - used in the data quality assessment exercises during the Food Comp course (Wageningen, Bratislava) - are included below:

Tsanova-Sanova et al - (+)-Catechin and (-)-epicatechin in Bulgarian fruits

Koivu et al - Determination of Phylloquinone in Vegetables, Fruits, and Berries by High Performance Liquid Chromatography with Electrochemical Detection