2022-Q3
October 6, 2022
Our major update this quarter includes deployment of a new extraction workflow and schema for epidemiology data. Named epiv2 in the software; all new assessments and existing assessments without epidemiology data extraction have been migrated to the new schema; assessments with the old schema, epiv1, are unchanged. The updated schema simplifies the old schema and user interface for data extraction and makes it easier to extract data at a high level (for systematic evidence maps, SEM), as well as a more detailed granular level, depending on the nature of the assessment. This release includes all the required components for data extraction; future releases will include the components needed to build summary tables and visualizations - in the meantime, try out the extraction forms and let us know what you think!
In addition, we made the following larger changes:
- We updated assessment audit-logs support to create new exports and improving our current logs to show more information
- We updated and standardized many of the forms that we use in HAWC. We've rewritten the text input fields, as well as the autocomplete/autosuggest fields using more modern, stable, and secure technologies. We hope this makes for a more seamless experience for users
- We enhanced summary visuals and tables to reflect the needs of users integrating the visuals into their projects - we hope these updates make the current visuals more flexible
Two other major changes have been released in our next branch this quarter. These features are available under deployment feature flags and are undergoing some testing by users prior to merging into our main release branch; they are indicated below by the 🧪 emoji. Some production deployments may not have these features available; we hope to have them live soon:
- 🧪 Capturing additional assessment level metadata on a HAWC assessment and quantitative values for a final conclusion. In larger organizations, HAWC is frequently one of many tools and resources used for conducting a systematic review and health assessment. Therefore, we've added some new high-level assessment level fields to capture information regarding the larger project (class of project, relevant documents or URLs, QA procedure and methodology), and fields for capturing health values of interest (points of departure, reference values, etc). #674
- 🧪 Capturing ecological data of interest in a health assessment. Some health assessments include impacts on the environment and ecological health as well as human health. We've created a new data extraction module to extract fields in this domain as well, when appropriate. #634
The complete changelog is described below:
New features:
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Overall Assessment Settings
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Literature Screening
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Data extraction
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Risk of Bias/Study evaluation
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Summary tables and visualizations
- Literature tagtrees
- Added a legend #684
- Added an option to show or hide reference counts, hiding counts is useful for documenting the approach in the planning and protocol phase #684
- Added the ability to drag and drop nodes for complex tree layouts #684
- Fixed bug where reference lists for a node were improperly filtered #654
- Data Pivots
- Updated forest plots to include treatment related effects in addition to statistical significance; can be used for conditional formatting #681
- Updated barcharts to handle standard deviation for error bars (previously only confidence intervals were handled correctly) #651 #697
- Added numeric duration exposure, useful for sorting #651
- Study Evaluation Heatmaps/Barcharts
- Improved default positioning of legend #685
- Evidence Profile Tables
- Study Evaluation Tables
- Literature tagtrees
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General improvements
- Updated the EPA header and footer to match the new style guidelines #693 #703
- Fix mobile rendering of website (sidebar collapse) #672 #700 #664
- Modernized HTML text data entry fields to improve consistency and stability #655 #699
- Modernized text autocomplete data entry fields to improve consistency and stability #667 #698 #701
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Administrative
Bug/regressions fixed:
- Fixed bug in downloading SVG exports of visuals #677
- Fixed bug which prevented updating assessment file attachments #695
- Better handle improper Unicode in Excel exports #652 #670
- Report an error on extremely large exploratory heatmaps instead of crashing the browser #671
- Improve validation error messages for users #658 #643
- Fix assorted errors #646 #696 #679 #676 #692
Software upgrades/security/stability:
- Quality of life improvements to developer experience #689 #660
- Rewrote integration tests using Playwright instead of Selenium #650
- Rewrote documentation using more user-friendly markdown instead of sphinx #680
- Fix deployment on servers with FIPS cryptography enforcement (RHEL8) #688
- Update HAWC configuration to reasonable and secure defaults #649 #691