About EpiSPIDER

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES:

  1. ProMED Mail Mailing List Web Site - the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases is an Internet-based reporting system dedicated to rapid global dissemination of information on outbreaks of infectious diseases and acute exposures to toxins that affect human health, including those in animals and in plants grown for food or animal feed. Electronic communications enable ProMED-mail to provide up-to-date and reliable news about threats to human, animal, and food plant health around the world, seven days a week. We used custom connection to obtain content from the ProMED mail website and natural language processing algorithms (combined shallow parsing and finite state machine) to process free text.
  2. askMEDLINE - askMEDLINE is a free-text, plain language query tool that might be useful for clinicians, researchers, and other information seekers interested in finding current evidence in MEDLINE/PubMed. The text-only format could be convenient for users with wireless handheld devices and those with low-bandwidth connections in remote locations.
  3. Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) - provides tools and analyses promoting engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. We used CAIDA's standard REST interface for obtaining spatial attributes for IP addresses.
  4. Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) - The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System provides near real-time alerts about natural disasters around the world and tools to facilitate response coordination, including news, maps and V. OSOCC. We used a custom RSS (Really Simple Syndication, a W3C XML standard) parser for obtaining GDACS data.
  5. Yahoo Maps AJAX/Javascript API and Javascript-Flash API - offer powerful Maps APIs for publishing maps on web sites and in client applications. We used the online Yahoo interfaces to obtain geocodes and real-time access to map data.
  6. Google Maps API - offers powerful Maps APIs for publishing maps on web sites and in client applications. We used the Google Maps interfaces to obtain geocodes and real-time access to map data.
  7. GeoNET Names Server (GNS) - The GEOnet Names Server (GNS) provides access to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's (NGA) and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names' (US BGN) database of foreign geographic feature names. The database is the official repository of foreign place-name decisions approved by the US BGN. Approximately 20,000 of the database's features are updated monthly. We use the database as a backup resource for the Yahoo Maps API.
  8. American Registry for Internet Numbers - Provides services related to the technical coordination and management of Internet number resources in its respective service region. The ARIN service region includes Canada, the United States, and several islands in the Caribbean Sea and North Atlantic Ocean. We use this as a lookup resource for IP addresses that do not resolve to a geocode.
OPEN SOURCE TOOLS/STANDARDS:
  1. JPGraph Dynamic Graph Utility - JpGraph is a Object-Oriented Graph creating library for PHP >= 4.3.1 The library is completely written in PHP and ready to be used in any PHP application. The library can be used to create numerous types of graphs and makes it easy to draw both "quick and dirty" graphs with a minimum of code as well as complex graphs which requires a very fine grained control.
  2. Rasmus Lerdorf's Cool Toys - template for EpiSPIDER mapping code
  3. PHP Form Submission Simulation - used for connecting to PubMED AskMEDLINE
  4. Scalable Vector Graphics (W3C)
  5. Browser Detection code by Harald Hope - for switching on SVG Map on/off
  6. MagpieRSS RSS Parser for PHP - MagpieRSS (aka Magpie) is an RSS and Atom parser for PHP. What is RSS? Learn more about it here.
  7. FeedCreator - RSS is an exciting, yet not quite new standard that lets you publish news from your page for other pages to syndicate. FeedCreator.class.php provides an easy way to create RSS feeds from within PHP using an easy-to-use class. We used FeedCreator to generate version 1 and 2 RSS feeds of ProMED mail reports.
  8. PHP PEAR XML Parser
  9. PHPMailIt - This is an email class by Jon Anders that will let you check your email, delete email from server, and send email without any built-in commands such as mail() and other imap functions. We use this to enable EpiSPIDER to intelligently communicate with users and to receive communication and instructions via email.
  10. Hypergraph - HyperGraph is an open source project which provides java code to work with hyperbolic geometry and especially with hyperbolic trees. It provides a very extensible api to visualize hyperbolic geometry, to handle graphs and to layout hyperbolic trees. We use this to visualize the email backlinks for each ProMED posting.
DEVELOPERS:
  1. Herman Tolentino (herman dot tolentino at epispider dot org)
  2. Raoul Kamadjeu (raoul dot kamadjeu at epispider dot org)
  3. Wei Li
  4. Jim Xian
COLLABORATION:
  1. Larry Madoff (ProMED Mail)
  2. Marjorie Pollack (ProMED Mail)
  3. Michael Matters (CDC Public Health Informatics Fellowship Program)
  4. Paul Fontelo (National Library of Medicine)
  5. Fang Liu (National Library of Medicine)
DISCLAIMER: This is an information integration demonstration project. The developers and participants make no claim about the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or timeliness of contents of this site. There may be occasional errors and missing information as a result of limitations imposed by integration of and connection to different electronic resources and failure of technology which may happen any time. By using this site, the site user (you )acknowledge that you are solely responsible for the outcomes from the use of the site material/content.