Epidemic analysis and visualization based on Digital Earth spatio-temporal framework

Digital Earth provides an excellent means for the visualization and analysis of the epidemic data. Currently the most of the epidemic data analysis is done only based on the data attributes such as number of victims, time of occurrence, type or intensity of the epidemic, etc. Most of the visualization of the epidemic is done merely using maps. Visualization of the place of occurrence or hot spot is one of the major factors in the analysis of the epidemic data which seems to be lacking in the current research projects. So, we have introduced a China Star Epidemic data visualization and analysis tool which can do comprehensive and thorough analysis and visualization of epidemic data. The tool integrates most of the attributes of the epidemic data into one single solid system. As a case study, we have used a real disease data of Shenzhen, China for this research. It is demonstrated that Digital Earth can be an excellent platform for the visualization of the changing pattern of epidemic data both in space and time dimension. The developed prototype also represents a tool to implement a concept of `Thinking Spatially´ in 3D dimension especially in epidemic data analysis and visualization domain.