Technical Description of the Distribute Project: A Community-based Syndromic Surveillance System Implementation

This paper describes the design of a syndromic surveillance system implemented for community-based monitoring of influenza-like illness. The system began as collaboration between colleagues from state and large metropolitan area health jurisdictions, academic institutions, and the non-profit, International Society for Disease Surveillance. Over the six influenza seasons from 2006 to 2012, the system was automated and enhanced, with new features and infrastructure, and the resulting, reliable, enterprise grade system supported peer comparisons between 44 state and local public health jurisdictions who voluntarily contributed summarized data on influenza-like illness and gastrointestinal syndromes. The system was unusual in that it addressed the needs of a widely distributed, voluntary, community engaged in real-time data integration to support operational public health.

Understanding the information needs of public health practitioners: a literature review to inform design of an interactive digital knowledge management system

The need for rapid access to information to support critical decisions in public health cannot be disputed; however, development of such systems requires an understanding of the actual information needs of public health professionals. This paper reports the results of a literature review focused on the information needs of public health professionals. The authors reviewed the public health literature to answer the following questions: (1) What are the information needs of public health professionals? (2) In what ways are those needs being met? (3) What are the barriers to meeting those needs? (4) What is the role of the Internet in meeting information needs? The review was undertaken in order to develop system requirements to inform the design and development of an interactive digital knowledge management system. The goal of the system is to support the collection, management, and retrieval of public health documents, data, learning objects, and tools.

METHOD

The search method extended beyond traditional information resources, such as bibliographic databases, tables of contents (TOC), and bibliographies, to include information resources public health practitioners routinely use or have need to use--for example, grey literature, government reports, Internet-based publications, and meeting abstracts.

RESULTS

Although few formal studies of information needs and information-seeking behaviors of public health professionals have been reported, the literature consistently indicated a critical need for comprehensive, coordinated, and accessible information to meet the needs of the public health workforce. Major barriers to information access include time, resource reliability, trustworthiness/credibility of information, and "information overload".

CONCLUSIONS

Utilizing a novel search method that included the diversity of information resources public health practitioners use, has produced a richer and more useful picture of the information needs of the public health workforce than other literature reviews. There is a critical need for public health digital knowledge management systems designed to reflect the diversity of public health activities, to enable human communications, and to provide multiple access points to critical information resources. Public health librarians and other information specialists can serve a significant role in helping public health professionals meet their information needs through the development of evidence-based decision support systems, human-mediated expert searching and training in the use information retrieval systems.

A knowledgebase system to enhance scientific discovery: Telemakus

BACKGROUND

With the rapid expansion of scientific research, the ability to effectively find or integrate new domain knowledge in the sciences is proving increasingly difficult. Efforts to improve and speed up scientific discovery are being explored on a number of fronts. However, much of this work is based on traditional search and retrieval approaches and the bibliographic citation presentation format remains unchanged.

METHODS

Case study.

RESULTS

The Telemakus KnowledgeBase System provides flexible new tools for creating knowledgebases to facilitate retrieval and review of scientific research reports. In formalizing the representation of the research methods and results of scientific reports, Telemakus offers a potential strategy to enhance the scientific discovery process. While other research has demonstrated that aggregating and analyzing research findings across domains augments knowledge discovery, the Telemakus system is unique in combining document surrogates with interactive concept maps of linked relationships across groups of research reports.

CONCLUSION

Based on how scientists conduct research and read the literature, the Telemakus KnowledgeBase System brings together three innovations in analyzing, displaying and summarizing research reports across a domain: (1) research report schema, a document surrogate of extracted research methods and findings presented in a consistent and structured schema format which mimics the research process itself and provides a high-level surrogate to facilitate searching and rapid review of retrieved documents; (2) research findings, used to index the documents, allowing searchers to request, for example, research studies which have studied the relationship between neoplasms and vitamin E; and (3) visual exploration interface of linked relationships for interactive querying of research findings across the knowledgebase and graphical displays of what is known as well as, through gaps in the map, what is yet to be tested. The rationale and system architecture are described and plans for the future are discussed.

An information extraction and representation system for rapid review of the biomedical literature

With the rapid expansion of scientific research, the ability to effectively find or integrate new domain knowledge in the sciences is proving increasingly difficult. The development of methods and tools for assisting researchers to effectively ex-tract problem-oriented knowledge from heterogeneous and massive information sources, and for using this knowledge in problem-solving is one of the most fundamental research directions for the information and computer sciences today. There is a need for new tools to support more precise identification of relevant research articles and provide visual clues regarding relationships among the document sets. We present the Telemakus system in which aggregated citation information and extracted research findings are displayed in a schema-based document surrogate and an interactive mapping tool provides graphical displays of research inter-relationships from documents across a domain. This system is an innovative approach to creating useful and precise document surrogates and may re-conceptualize the way we currently represent, retrieve, and assimilate research findings from the published literature.