Global Health Explorer (GHX) is an semantic web tool that can be used to conduct public health surveillance using Twitter. GHX can use any controlled vocabulary to extract term uses in Twitter and supports hypothesis formation and exploration of data sets using visual analysis. The resulting data, gathered in RDF, makes it possible to analyze term usage through both temporal and spatial dimensions.

GHX uses the qb.js framework to visualize and explore these data across dimensions, initially time and location. This allows users of GHX to monitor terms from pre-existing ontologies to conduct public health surveillance. We have prototyped the use of GHX to monitor terms from the NCI Thesaurus related to influenza-like illnesses.

Publication

James P. McCusker, Jeongmin Lee, Thomas Chavon, and Deborah L. McGuinness, 2013, Public Health Surveillance Using Global Health Explorer, In Proceedings of Joint Workshop on Semantic Technologies Applied to Biomedical Informatics and Individualized Medicine (SATBI+SWIM), co-located with the 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2012

The source code in Github
The web-presentation of the project made by James P. McCusker