The CommonGround visual paradigm for biosurveillance

Biosurveillance is a critical area in the intelligence community for real-time detection of disease outbreaks. Identifying epidemics enables analysts to detect and monitor disease outbreak that might be spread from natural causes or from possible biological warfare attacks. Containing these events and disseminating alerts requires the ability to rapidly find, classify and track harmful biological signatures. In this paper, we describe a novel visual paradigm to conduct biosurveillance using an Infectious Disease Weather Map. Our system provides a visual common ground in which users can view, explore and discover emerging concepts and correlations such as symptoms, syndromes, pathogens and geographic locations.