Goals - JohnTigue/idots GitHub Wiki

The goal of this project is to make outbreak data a first class object type in a web-native, machine readable fashion. The Spec enables that. The proof of any data spec is its reference implementation (read: software that actually works with data compliant with the specification), which in this case is Omolumeter.

It is completely unacceptable that in 2016 even MIT researchers have to scrounge for data on outbreaks:

Unfortunately, one of the issues we’ve faced during the ongoing Central and South American Zika outbreak has been a dearth of official case count data. In recent weeks, this has been partially mitigated thanks to this interactive, case count visualization PAHO released a little while ago. However, it’s worth noting that these data aren’t in a machine-readable format (and scraping from interactive visualizations can often be more challenging than doing so from PDFs).

Although there is some publicly published infectious disease outbreak time series (sometimes referred to as case counts) there is no current standard for interoperability. In June of 2016, The New England Journal of Medicine published a "Perspective" article, entitled Avoiding Data Dumpsters — Toward Equitable and Useful Data Sharing. Quoting:

One of the risks posed by these expanding repositories is the production of “data dumpsters”: repositories of data without the metadata, data dictionaries, or documentation needed for meaningful or correct reanalysis.

With regards to infectious disease outbreak time series, the Web is currently a data dumpster.

=== Needs rewrite ===

Turns out a major task of this project is to define the Outbreak Time Series Specification, curate some outbreak data, and the provide/host the curated/compiled data as a Web service at omolumeter.com

[Omolumeter]] initially was a tool for validating the data from any Web service conformant with the [Outbreak Time Series Specification. It is also intended demonstrate multiple world-class visualizations of ebola outbreak data; it is not just supposed to be some lame, minimal proof-of-concept (which is all it is as of 2016-06-13). It is intended to be the very best of its breed. That is to say the global Web game on epidemic visualization needs to be seriously stepped up and Omolumeter is intended to be the pace car.

There are many ebola visualization but very, very few that can be considered excellent, and of those none are open source code that reads open data via standard APIs. When Omolumeter has been deployed on multiple Web sites (white labeled, locally styled, without any credit given to this project) then this effort can be considered a success. Further success will be evidenced by a speedier engagement of the world during future outbreaks. i.e. this is not some one-off ebola specific project. (In the parlance of the medical governmental types this is "multi-use".)

A very important goal is to work with news outlets with an eye towards the future. Work with them so that their internal cultures know of the Omolumeter visualization codebase and Outbreak Time Series Specification so that they will know how to get info out earlier next time. In this view, Ebola2014 is just a trial run for future outbreaks, certainly with regard to these tools which came too late. Next time though...