Computational knowledge and information management in veterinary epidemiology

Monitoring of infectious animal diseases is an essential task for national biosecurity management and bioterrorism prevention. For this purpose, we present a system for animal disease outbreak analysis by automatically extracting relational information from online data. We aim to detect and map infectious disease outbreaks by extracting information from unstructured sources. The system crawls web sites and classifies pages by topical relevance. The information extraction component performs document analysis for animal disease related event recognition. The visualization component plots extracted events into GoogleMaps¹ using geospatial information and supports timeline representation of animal disease outbreaks in SIMILE².