Leveraging the Niche of Open Data for Disease Surveillance and Health Education

Introduction Transparency of information on infectious disease epidemics is crucial for not only public health workers but also the residents in the communities. Traditionally, disease control departments created official websites for displaying disease maps or epi-curves with the confirmed case counts. The websites were usually very formal and static, without interaction, animation, or even the aid of spatial statistics. Therefore, we tried to take advantage of open data and use a lightweight programming language, JavaScript, to create an interactive website, named “Taiwan Infectious Disease Map (http://ide.geohealth.tw/)“. With the website, we expect to provide real-time incidence information and related epidemiological features using interactive maps and charts.