Have you noticed? Maps are getting smarter....more dynamic and informative, from global maps, like the one below on disease outbreaks, to what I call BAN maps..body area network maps that track disease progress such as cancer cell spread or bacterial infection spread through the body.
Over the next several posts, I'll review some recent examples of smart maps that are made possible by new web and graphics technology called Mash-ups, which combine 2 disparate date points sources such as health and geography.
Web-based maps are used regularly for keeping tabs on weather and traffic, so why not for disease outbreaks, too?
Smart Maps part 1 of 4: Daily Plague Forecast
Wired Magazine writes:
Get Your Daily Plague Forecast
[...]
The new Healthmap website digests information from a variety of sources ranging from the World Health Organization to Google News and plots the spread of about 50 diseases on a continually updated global map.
It was developed as a side project by two staffers at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program in Boston -- physician John Brownstein and software developer Clark Freifeld.
While working on a state-funded program to track disease outbreaks in Massachusetts, the two discovered some inconsistencies in how information is reported. Some sources, such as ProMed-mail, provide very specific data that is verified by medical experts, but the process can be lengthy. At the other extreme, newspaper articles and blog entries come out far more quickly, but they are more likely to contain errors such as unconfirmed reports about avian flu infections in a country.
"You always have this trade-off between timeliness and specificity," said Brownstein.
To cheat the trade-off, the pair developed a site that collects data from various sources: the slow and accurate as well as the fast and approximate. Freifeld created a computer program that scans text from RSS news feeds and web page "screen scrapes" to find information about a disease and where it was reported. Using Google Maps, the site places icons that correspond to individual disease reports.
Full Wired Story>> [...]
See Map at http://healthmap.org
..tomorrow we will explore a global disaster alert map
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