A framework for enhancing spatial and temporal granularity in report-based health surveillance systems

Abstract

Current public concern over the spread of infectious diseases has underscored the importance of health surveillance systems for the speedy detection of disease outbreaks. Several international report-based monitoring systems have been developed, including GPHIN, Argus, HealthMap, and BioCaster. A vital feature of these report-based systems is the geo-temporal encoding of outbreak-related textual data. Until now, automated systems have tended to use an ad-hoc strategy for processing geo-temporal information, normally involving the detection of locations that match pre-determined criteria, and the use of document publication dates as a proxy for disease event dates. Although these strategies appear to be effective enough for reporting events at the country and province levels, they may be less effective at discovering geo-temporal information at more detailed levels of granularity. In order to improve the capabilities of current Web-based health surveillance systems, we introduce the design for a novel scheme called spatiotemporal zoning.