EpidVis: A visual web querying tool for animal epidemiology surveillance

Abstract

The use of electronic media for the detection and monitoring of animal disease outbreaks is crucial for disease surveillance and early warning systems. Animal health specialists regularly query web pages using various formulations to obtain up-to-date news on disease outbreaks. This task, however, is often manual and time-consuming. Visualization techniques can nevertheless facilitate their web searches, compared to traditional searches. This article presents EpidVis, a visual web query tool designed for experts in animal health, conducting epidemic intelligence activities from news sources on the Internet. It consists of several views that help the domain experts efficiently build and launch queries, as well as visualize the results. Moreover, it supports external information integration to help domain experts enrich their knowledge and adapt their queries. EpidVis was assessed considering usability (user study) and usefulness for experts (case study). The results show that our tool helps domain experts in their daily surveillance tasks, allowing them to extract in timely manner accurate information on disease outbreaks from the web.

Teaching user-friendly web design: A case study on Zillow.com in the real estate industry

“…The user often uses a number of different queries before finding one the works best. “The main challenge in this task is to effectively formulate queries in order to obtain the correct information” (Fadloun et al, 2020: 48–64). Administering an immediate after-use survey to current or prospective users, and then using that data to maximize link redesign is one tried-and-true method.…”

Integrating Textual Data into Heterogeneous Data Ingestion Processing

“…In [3], the extraction of different features from multisource heterogeneous data, including trading transaction data, comments from user discussion boards, and news events, is proposed. Other approaches based on visual analytics [9] integrate textual data into heterogeneous data ingestion pipelines [5].…”

EpidNews: Extracting, exploring and annotating news for monitoring animal diseases

“…In this subsection, we discuss about the monitoring systems in animal epidemiology. Although some visualization approaches have been proposed in the epidemiological field (e.g., [10,11,19,20,21,22]), most of them focus on human diseases rather than on animal diseases. Moreover, none of them provides a complete visualization capturing the overall complexity of the data: various epidemiological entities -diseases, hosts and symptoms-, spatio-temporal dimensions, official and unofficial sources.…”