The Integrated System for Public Health Monitoring of West Nile Virus (ISPHM-WNV): a real-time GIS for surveillance and decision-making

BACKGROUND: After its first detection in North America in New York in 1999, West Nile virus was detected for the first time in 2002 in the province of Quebec, Canada. This situation forced the Government of Quebec to adopt a public health protection plan against the virus. The plan comprises several fields of intervention including the monitoring of human cases, Corvidae and mosquitoes in order to ensure the early detection of the presence of the virus in a particular area. To help support the monitoring activities, the Integrated System for Public Health Monitoring of West Nile Virus (ISPHM-WNV) has been developed. RESULTS: The ISPHM-WNV is a real-time geographic information system for public health surveillance of West Nile virus and includes information on Corvidae, mosquitoes, humans, horses, climate, and preventive larvicide interventions. It has been in operation in the province of Quebec, Canada, since May 2003. The ISPHM-WNV facilitates the collection, localization, management and analysis of monitoring data; it also allows for the display of the results of analyses on maps, tables and statistical diagrams. CONCLUSION: The system is very helpful for field workers in all regions of the province, as well as for central authorities. It represents the common authoritative source of data for analysis, exchange and decision-making

Spatial On-Line Analytical Processing (SOLAP): Concepts, Architectures, and Solutions from a Geomatics Engineering Perspective

It is recognized that 80 % of data have a spatial component (ex. street address, place name, geographic coordinates, map coordinates). Having the possibilities to display data on maps, to compare maps of different phenomena or epochs, and to combine maps with tables and statistical charts allows one to get more insights into spatial datasets. Furthermore, performing fast spatiotemporal analysis, interactively exploring the data by drilling on maps similarly to drilling on tables and charts, and easily synchronizing such operations among these views is nowadays required by more and more users. This can be done by combining Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), paving the way to “SOLAP” (Spatial OLAP). The present chapter focuses on the spatial characteristics of SOLAP from a geomatics engineering point of view: concepts, architectures, tools and remaining challenges

Coupling MultiAgent GeoSimulation and Spatial OLAP for Better Geosimulation Data Analysis

ABSTRACT. Building a good simulation model can be a lot of work. We need to specify and model the system to be simulated, implement the model, collect data on the corresponding real system (if any), verify and validate the simulation system and run the simulation. In order to test different ideas, to learn about the system behavior in new situations and to make efficient decisions, decision makers need ways to explore the simulation outputs easily and rapidly. Geosimulation users need tools to analyse the spatial output data. In this paper we present an approach which combines spatial on-line analytical processing (SOLAP) techniques with multiagent geosimulation techniques in order to improve the exploration of spatial and non-spatial data resulting from geosimulations. As an example, we present the application of our approach to the simulation of the shopping behavior of customers in a shopping mall.