Geographic coverage of English language news reports of infectious disease outbreaks collected through Google News from October 1, 2006 through July 18, 2007. (A) displays counts of disease outbreak reports; (B) displays population-adjusted outbreak reporting as number of reports per million inhabitants.

(1) Web-based data are acquired from a variety of Web sites every hour, 7 days a week (ranging from rumors on discussion sites to news media to validated official reports). (2) The extracted articles are then categorized by pathogen and location of the outbreak in question. (3) Articles are then analyzed for duplication and content. Duplicate articles are removed, while those that discuss new information about an ongoing situation are integrated with other related articles and added to the interactive map. (4) Once classified, articles are filtered by their relevance into five categories. Only “breaking news” articles are added as markers to the map.

All articles related to a given outbreak are aggregated by text similarity matching in order to provide a situational awareness report. Furthermore, other outbreaks occurring in the same geographic area or involving the same pathogen are provided. The window also provides links to further research on the subject. In this example, we show all alerts relating to a recent cholera outbreak in Nigeria.