13  Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

13.1 Data and Maintenance Issues

Data documents can’t be directly provided by ChemExpo without copyright infringement. However, ChemExpo provides on the data document page a link to the original URL from which the document was obtained. PudMedIDs and DOIs are also provided where they are available.

The location at which an organization or a manufacturer provides a document may change over time. ChemExpo also provides a link to a Google Search for the document title to aid users in locating the document if it is still available elsewhere.

The ChemExpo application will have updates as needed and as resources become available. The data in ChemExpo, however, is expected to be updated bi-annually.

Updates to the underlying data in ChemExpo are planned as more information is collected and curated. Based on beta testing, some updates to the application itself may be planned based on available resources.

Exposure predictions for chemicals can be found on the U.S. EPA’s CompTox Chemicals Dashboard (CCD).

Yes, recommendations can be sent to the ChemExpo Curation Team via the contact email. Data sources are prioritized for curation according to uniqueness (compared to other information in ChemExpo) and relevance to EPA.

While ChemExpo does not contain this information specifically, the Product Use Categories (PUCs) contain attributes (for example, “spray”) which may allow mapping of a product category to specific exposure routes. In addition, mapping of formulation PUCs to specific release scenarios were provided in the Supplement of Isaacs et al. (2020) (although the PUCs used here have evolved since that publication).

Since these are model predictions as opposed to reported use information from public documents, these data are not included in ChemExpo. They are provided on the Exposure Tab of the CompTox Chemicals Dashboard.

Many chemical ingredients in ChemExpo are extracted from safety data sheets (SDS) reported by the manufacturer (see Appendix C). However, these documents are only required to include ingredients for products that might pose a hazard to humans. If there are no substances that meet those requirements, there will be no chemical cards for that product. Future versions of ChemExpo may be able to filter out these products.

In the majority of cases, seemingly duplicate products are likely multiple products (unique UPCs) that have the same name. These documents are currently considered unique in the ChemExpo data model. The same products could have been collected from different data sources. In addition, some products have their formulations updated over time, when this happens there may be duplicate records of the same product, but from different years.

13.2 Usability Questions

Persistence of a web site or an online document over time is a common issue in all data curation efforts, ChemExpo makes every effort to ensure that we provide the URL of the source document from the time it was downloaded for curation. However, that does not mean that the URL will work in perpetuity.

Further, ChemExpo does not provide the actual SDS published by a company since that is copyrighted material. It does however, provide a URL to the site from which the SDS was downloaded. From a Data Document Details Page, the URL for a data source (at the time it was downloaded) is provided in the upper right hand corner as an external link button (square with an arrow pointing out of it). Alternatively, there is the function to automatically perform a search via the Google search engine for that Data Document title. This can be done by clicking the magnifying glass button in the upper right corner of the Data Document Details Page.

A Universal Product Code (UPC) is a unique number assigned to a product. This is typically found on a product’s barcode. For some products within ChemExpo, the UPC is known. For others, however, the UPC is not known. In these cases, a stub identifier is assigned to products as a UPC code.

If there are no results from a ChemExpo search in any of the six information categories, this means that there is no curated information available that matches these terms in ChemExpo’s underlying database. It does not necessarily mean the data does not exist, just that it is not currently contained within ChemExpo. If you know of a source that contains information you are looking for and would like to see it added to ChemExpo, please email the ChemExpo team at chemexpo.support@epa.gov.

At its heart ChemExpo was developed to aid in providing information for performing exposure evaluations of chemicals. However, consumers are welcome to use this application to identify various chemical ingredients noted to be in specific product types (product composition and use), why those chemicals may be there (functional use), and what general categories are associated with a chemical or document (list presence keywords). Consumers should be aware of the limitations of these data and their uses as described in the Disclaimer.

Under the Hazard Communication Standard, manufacturers are allowed to claim ingredients and the composition in products as proprietary. Often when users find a chemical with the name “Proprietary” this means the ingredient’s name was not released on the SDS for a product. Other ingredients may be reported in general terms, for example, “fragrance”. ChemExpo reports ingredients as they were found on the original document.