IDOTS Project
This project is about infectious disease outbreaks, specifically their time series data. This is an attempt to come up with a Web-native data standard for such data. IDOTS is an acronym for Infectious Disease Outbreak Time Series. This project is about connecting the IDOTS on the Web.
The project also involves producing open source Web software for interacting with the data standard. For example, the Omolumeter is a Web visualizer of outbreak time series data. A live Omoluter demo (using 2014 Ebola data) is at omolumeter.com.
This project defines the Outbreak Time Series Specification (the Spec). The Spec describes an abstract data model for time series data about infectious disease outbreaks. The abstract data model can be represented in Web-native standards such as CSV, JSON, and XML.
Oversimplifying, the fundamental messages encoded by the spec are of the form: For disease D, during time period T, at location L, for population P the following was recorded: X new deaths, Y new suspected cases, etc.
Or in more informal terminology, an Outbreak Time Series is an infectious disease's microblog: "Today I killed 100 in Nottatown; I also caused 1500 cases. Over in Whereastan, I killed..."
The Outbreak Time Series Spec defines the data structure, and the Omolumeter software visualizes Spec data in a interactive manner. Omolumeter is built only on standard Web client technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and SVG. It can be hosted on static content Web servers.
More info
For project status, see the wiki.
The best place to go for more information is the outbreak_time_series project's wiki.
If you want to jump in and get involved:
- The To Do List provides an overview of where things are at
- The Issue Tracker is where to find the nitty-gritty
Blog posts about the project can be found at:
http://tigue.com/