Geomedica: managing and querying clinical data distributions on geographical database systems

Geographical databases are a significant and mature tool, useful in many application areas thanks to the spread of new positioning and mapping technologies. Geographical functionalities can be added to existing applications, from land management to water and electricity control systems. The use of geographical information applications greatly improves data interpretation, thus helping users in making better decisions. Further improvements can be obtained by using more sophisticated tools (e.g. On Line Analytical Processing and Data Mining techniques) to highlight interesting and previously unknown relations on spatio-temporal data, which can help in a better understanding of data.In this paper we report the experience of using GIS technologies to analyze clinical data containing health information about a large population. Clinical data have been geocoded by associating tuples related to some geographical position with the coordinates of a map and then analyzed and queried using both SQL-like languages and a graphical user interface. Several experiments have been performed using data related to an italian district which have been furnished by an association of family doctors and patients. Test queries performed on the available dataset were able to correctly correlate health data about patients with geographical features (e.g. points of interest, boundaries, coastlines vectors) and to visualize diseases geographical distributions on a map