Development of spatial density maps based on geoprocessing web services: application to tuberculosis incidence in Barcelona, Spain

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Health professionals and authorities strive to cope with heterogeneous data, services, and statistical models to support decision making on public health. Sophisticated analysis and distributed processing capabilities over geocoded epidemiological data are seen as driving factors to speed up control and decision making in these health risk situations. In this context, recent Web technologies and standards-based web services deployed on geospatial information infrastructures have rapidly become an efficient way to access, share, process, and visualize geocoded health-related information.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Data used on this study is based on Tuberculosis (TB) cases registered in Barcelona city during 2009. Residential addresses are geocoded and loaded into a spatial database that acts as a backend database. The web-based application architecture and geoprocessing web services are designed according to the Representational State Transfer (REST) principles. These web processing services produce spatial density maps against the backend database.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The results are focused on the use of the proposed web-based application to the analysis of TB cases in Barcelona. The application produces spatial density maps to ease the monitoring and decision making process by health professionals. We also include a discussion of how spatial density maps may be useful for health practitioners in such contexts.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>In this paper, we developed web-based client application and a set of geoprocessing web services to support specific health-spatial requirements. Spatial density maps of TB incidence were generated to help health professionals in analysis and decision-making tasks. The combined use of geographic information tools, map viewers, and geoprocessing services leads to interesting possibilities in handling health data in a spatial manner. In particular, the use of spatial density maps has been effective to identify the most affected areas and its spatial impact. This study is an attempt to demonstrate how web processing services together with web-based mapping capabilities suit the needs of health practitioners in epidemiological analysis scenarios.</p

21st Century City Temperature Analogs in the United States

Decades of research now show that the planet is slowly warming and that this trend will affect life on Earth over the long term. Water supply, weather patterns, and disease are examples of the many ways in which climate change will directly affect humans. Mitigation planning efforts will require new ways of thinking about, visualizing, and analyzing the massive amounts of forecast data now available from a multitude of climate models. Various temperature-forecast models and datasets exist to help analyze climate change effects. This project converted one of those into a spatial database, extracted yearly averages for a selected set of United States cities, and used them to create lists of which cities’ temperatures are forecast to be most analogous to which others at various forecast years. A web application built with ESRI’s ArcGIS Server and Flex API visually linked these analogs to compare and contrast disparate geographic locations in new ways. A disciplined use of accepted design practices will allow this example to be easily adapted and extended in future analyses

Design and Development of Personal GeoServices for Universities

Personal GeoServices are emerging as an interaction paradigm linking users to information rich environments like a university campus or to Big Data sources like the Internet of Things by delivering spatially intelligent web-services. OpenStreetMap (OSM) constitutes a valuable source of spatial base-data that can be extracted, integrated, and utilised with such heterogeneous data sources for free. In this paper, we present a Personal GeoServices application built on OSM spatial data and university-specific business data for staff, faculty, and students. While generic products such as Google Maps and Google Earth enable basic forms of spatial exploration, the domain of a university campus presents specific business information needs, such as “What classes are scheduled in that room over there?” and “How can I get to Prof. Murray’s office from here?” Within the framework of the StratAG project (www.StratAG.ie), an eCampus Demonstrator was developed for the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM) to assist university users in exploring and analysing their surroundings within a detailed data environment. This work describes this system in detail, discussing the usage of OSM vector data, and providing insights for developers of spatial information systems for personalised visual exploration of an area

An Architecture for Provenance Systems

This document covers the logical and process architectures of provenance systems. The logical architecture identifies key roles and their interactions, whereas the process architecture discusses distribution and security. A fundamental aspect of our presentation is its technology-independent nature, which makes it reusable: the principles that are exposed in this document may be applied to different technologies

Utilizing distributed web resources for enhanced knowledge representation

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The Use of GIS in the Morongo Basin Regional Conservation Plan

The preservation of open space areas provides habitat protection for a number of plant and animal species, as well as places of natural beauty by redirecting future development to existing communities. The Morongo Basin Open Space Group (MBOSG) is ensuring the preservation of these areas, by developing a regional conservation plan for Morongo Basin that focuses on open space protection. Because of the basin’s large geographic coverage area, the MBOSG has prioritized its conservation efforts. The group, however, needed a tool to help evaluate their priorities and effectively communicate other conservation information to the public. This project addressed these needs by developing an analysis tool and a series of online maps of the group’s conservation themes and prioritized areas. The analysis tool aimed at helping conservation planners and other decision-makers to develop strategies and effectively allocate resources to the most appropriate places. The online maps served to enhance public access to important conservation material