Mapping Bird Flu News - Innovative and Graphic Way to Monitor Emerging News on Bird Flu

Featured Article
Main Category: Bird Flu / Avian Flu
Also Included In: Flu / Cold / SARS
Article Date: 30 Nov 2005 - 15:00 PDT

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An innovative and graphic way to monitor emerging news on Bird Flu (avian flu) has been announced today by medical news specialists Medical News Today, and information consultants Daden Consulting.

The service enables the bird flu stories from Medical News Today's existing Flu, Bird Flu and SARS RSS News Feed to be plotted onto a map of the world by Daden Consulting's NewsGlobe software. The maps can be either Google Maps - a zoomable 2D map of the world embedded in a web page, or Google Earth - a browsable 3D world globe built from spy satellite imagery which runs as a separate application.

The maps are able to indicate which countries are currently involved in Flu stories, and how many stories there are for each country. Markers are colour coded to show whether the news is general, a reporting of cases, or mentions the H5N1 strain of the virus. Compared to browsing through a linear news feed the NewsGlobe application can give users an at-a-glance assessment of the key global bird flu news. Medical News Today source their bird flu news from research organisations and government bodies. Both Medical news Today and Daden Consulting are UK based companies.

Alastair Hazell, Technical Director of Medical News Today, said "This is a fantastic, easy to use addition for our readers."

David Burden, MD of Daden Consulting, said "This is an excellent example of the power of our NewsGlobe system. Since we provide it as a web application Medical News Today have had to make no changes to their systems at all. We just pick up the RSS feed, apply our filtering and geo-location processes, and then generate the mapping dynamically for every user."

NewsGlobe can be readily extended to other news feeds on the Medical News Today site. NewsGlobe is already being used on a wide variety of other news feeds around the world, and has been used over 400,000 times since its launch in July. When used with Google Earth bird flu stories can even be combined with other data sources - such as wind information or bird migration patterns. In the unfortunate situation that bird flu outbreaks become more prevalent in the UK NewsGlobe can also switch to a country specific mode, plotting stories to town and village level. If stories have location information embedded in them (such as postcode or national grid references) then stories and case details could be displayed to 100m accuracy.

1 - Daden Consulting is part of Daden Limited, a small privately owned UK company focussed on information consulting. Daden is based in Birmingham UK. See www.daden.co.uk for more information.

2 - Medical News Today is part of Pharma-Lexicon International, which owns: - medicalnewstoday.com - hospitalsworldwide.com - medilexicon.com.

3 - RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is an emerging web standard which lets web sites make news and other information available in a machine readable format for use in personal news aggregators or other applications - such as NewsGlobe.

4 - Google Earth and Google Maps are innovative web based mapping services launched by Google Inc. See earth.google.com and maps.google.com for more information.

URLS:

The Medical News Today Flu/Bird Flu/SARS feed page is at:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?category=56

The NewsGlobe/Bird Flu information page is at:
daden.co.uk/birdflu

Contact Details

All media enquiries should be addressed to either:

David Burden
Daden Limited
103 Oxford Rd
Moseley
Birmingham
B13 9SG
Tel: +44 (0)121 247 3628
Mobile: +44 (0)701 0711 927
david.burden@daden.co.uk
http://www.daden.co.uk

Alastair Hazell
Technical Director
Medical News Today
Tel: +44 (0)1424 217962
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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