The picture of health: map-based, collaborative spatio-temporal disease tracking

Abstract

Disease outbreaks are intimately tied to geographic locations and to times, and as a result, health-related GIS along with open, Web-based data sources are increasingly crucial for public health. One such data source, ProMED-mail, offers disease reports distributed as email postings, along with locations and times of relevance. Locations are specified in text rather than in geometry, which necessitates a method for mapping textual locations to their spatial representations, called geotagging. To address this need, the previously-developed STEWARD system is leveraged for disease detection and tracking by geotagging ProMED-mail postings. While STEWARD was previously used in a disease tracking role, improvements to STEWARD are described including an innovative time slider that allows powerful and intuitive spatio-textual querying. Many additional future improvements for STEWARD and related systems are also discussed.