Unfortunately, the TechPresident folks seem to be mistaking Dr. Niman's work for the work of a researcher in the UK that had a completely open Google Map that anyone could add data to report suspected and confirmed cases of Swine Flu. The results of that UK effort were what you might expect, and ended up with all sorts of garbage in the data. Dr. Niman's work started on Google MyMaps with him trying to drop pins on the map wherever he and his colleagues found cases. I don't believe he ever used Twitter as a source, and has always been doing this by hand from the start. The data was pretty much not structured and did lead to some duplication. Rhiza Labs stepped in yesterday and helped build a more reasonable way of collecting this data, with the result being a highly curated collection of reports of suspected and confirmed swine flu cases. The results of this work are up on http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com You can download the raw data, as well as play around with our visualization tool if you want. Our visualization tool specializes in helping users explore and create custom analysis of geospatial data, regardless of the size of the dataset(s). The bottom line in all of this is that neither the government, nor other health agencies, are providing tools for exploring and visualizing this data for people who want more details. The lack of a comprehensive tracking system is appalling and has led to all of these ad hoc efforts. -josh  Josh Knauer, CEO of Rhiza Labs [email protected] | office: 412-488-0600 | cell: 412-551-2163 | twitter: jknauer On Apr 30, 2009, at 2:02 PM, [email protected] wrote:
|
_______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
