Earlier today I learned about EpiSPIDER, a web service from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What is EpiSPIDER? From the blog
… a new Web application that uses RDF and RSS for aggregating global surveillance information on epidemics and world health problems. Information is dynamically collected from news feeds as well as the ProMED reports created by the International Society for Infectious Diseases. Text from these sources are mined, associated with UMLS disease concepts, and converted into RDF. The information is then associated by events and countries (using a Google-map interface) to alert health researchers around the world.
The service includes a Google Maps mashup, various graphs, a treemap, etc. Quite nice.
Technorati Tags: CDC, Semantic Web, RDF, EpiSPIDER
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[...] This brings to my mind a post in which I had written about the CDC and how it has embraced the semantic web. You can see such a concept being extended to the kind of system that Hari is talking about. If there was a system that allowed people to upload information to a database that can capture the right kind of metadata to feed a system like EpiSPIDER, then I don’t see why it would be that difficult to do what Hari proposes. The key lies in making any such submission system simple to use, i.e. any geotagging, semantic information is handled by the system and not the user. Another possibility is to bring healthcare providers into the picture, as then you could actually have a service that pings EMR systems to find out if there are any patterns for infectious diseases, etc. [...]
[...] First of all, health informatics probably means different things to different people. In my mind, health informatics is only really useful if it not only benefits the individual, but also our overall understanding of medicine. The challenge identifies health informatics as the acquisition, management and use of information in health, with the purpose of enhancing the quality and efficiency of medical care and response to public health emergencies. All are topics that have been referred to often here, whether it be in the field of telemedicine, or infectious disease management. [...]