Dengue infection plays a central role in our society, since it is the most prevalent vector-borne viral disease affecting humans. We statistically investigated patterns concerning the spatial spreading of dengue epidemics in Brazil, as well as their temporal evolution in all Brazilian municipalities for a period of 12 years. We showed that the distributions of cases in municipalities follow pow...

BACKGROUND Reducing the smoking population is still high on the policy agenda, as smoking leads to many preventable diseases, such as lung cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and more. In Austria, data on smoking prevalence only exists at the federal state level. This provides an interesting overview about the current health situation, but for regional planning authorities these data are often ins...

OBJECTIVE To describe the spatial patterns of leprosy in the Brazilian state of Tocantins. METHODS This study was based on morbidity data obtained from the Sistema de Informações de Agravos de Notificação (SINAN - Brazilian Notifiable Diseases Information System), of the Ministry of Health. All new leprosy cases in individuals residing in the state of Tocantins, between 2001 and 2012, were in...

We show that a recently proposed model generates accurate commuting networks on 80 case studies from different regions of the world (Europe and United-States) at different scales (e.g. municipalities, counties, regions). The model takes as input the number of commuters coming in and out of each geographic unit and generates the matrix of commuting flows between the units. The single parameter o...

While many analyses require smart and flexible aggregation of adjacent and complex polygons storing quantitative data, currently available tools do not meet this need. In this work we present the ‘SmartDissolve v1.0’ toolbox for ArcGIS (Esri) and MATLAB, a new approach and tool that handles minimum mapping unit, resolution mismatch between layers, or spatial uncertainty problems in GISc. This t...

Laube for their valuable advice, bright ideas, and numerous contributions. Second, I wish to thank all other WSL staff members that helped me to complete this project. This particularly includes PD Dr. Rolf Grütter for various inputs on ontologies and proofreading the thesis. Furthermore, I sincerely thank Dr. Thomas Scharrenbach for introducing me into Semantic Web software such as Pellet, Pro...