EpidNews: An Epidemiological News Explorer for Monitoring Animal Diseases

In the recent years, there has been a massive increase in the amount of data being produced about human and animal health related events. Epidemiologists have to analyze this epidemiological data on a regular basis. They use this spatio-temporal information, most of which is shared online, to detect, observe, and track geographic locations of disease outbreaks over time. Unfortunately, manually retrieving the data from a website like Google News and then deriving sensible insights from the huge dataset consumes a lot of time and effort. We present EpidNews, a new visual analytics tool that helps to visualize and explore epidemiological news data for animals. The tool uses several views depicting various levels of abstraction, which helps fulfill almost all the data analysis requirements of epidemiologists. We also present the case study of an epidemiology expert, wherein she assesses the usability and productivity of EpidNews by using the tool in her daily work.