Epidemic Marketplace: An Information Management System for Epidemiological Data

The Epidemic Marketplace is part of a computational framework for organizing data for epidemic modeling and forecasting. It is a distributed data management platform where epidemiological data can be stored, managed and made available to the scientific community. It includes tools for the automatic interaction with other applications through web services, for the collection of epidemiological data from internet social networks and for discussion of related topics. This paper defines its requirements, architecture and implementation plan based on open-source software. This platform will assist epidemiologists and public health scientists in finding, sharing and exchanging data.