Biosurveillance, Classification, and Semantic Health Technologies

The emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s catapulted the Internet from a curiosity for computer scientists, engineers, and experimenters testing data interchange technologies into a vast, dynamic, and unprecedented information resource that has fundamentally transformed science, society, and human communications. The implications of this intellectual paradigm shift are still being explored, and the full impact of this dramatic transformation, which instantly makes available massive amounts of information, has not yet become fully appreciated. Nevertheless, the emerging dependency of the health sciences on increasingly practical semantic technologies to organize and leverage these vast information resources is now unquestioned. Ranging from the interpretive functionality of the human genome to public health surveillance among nations and continents, the full spectrum of health science is being fundamentally transformed by the application of basic science informatics in the domains of meanings, ontologies, and natural language processing; these have matured into critical technologies and unquestioned adjuncts of the emerging big-science transformation of biomedicine and healthcare.In this issue of the Journal, two articles illustrate some of these dependencies upon semantic health technologies. The first employs sophisticated dictionary lookup techniques to classify news and specialist articles about disease outbreaks as an adjunct to outbreak detection and severity measurement. The second posits a sophisticated scaling of outbreak severity based not only on disease metrics but also on sociological and governmental reactions in the face of mild to severe epidemics.The article …