As we will see, we have quite a wealth of data resources today that can be mined for answers to difficult but timely questions about how infectious diseases affect world. However, as we have explained, the current state of those resources and a lack of tools for automating the data discovery and integration, makes answering these questions in a timely way impossible. Nevertheless, the resources we do have at hand gives us a view how our job could be easier.
...text describing some of the questions and analyses we want to be able to address...
We envision a future where all of the key data resources and their providers appear to us as a coordinated team ready to take on our question of the day. For instance, as we become aware of an emerging disease outbreak, we might visit the Global Health Observatory (GHO) from the WHO to get an overview of the latest reported infections. We wish to quickly explore a hypothesis regarding infection propagation and vectors. The GHO has links to other key portals, such as the Gridded Population of the World and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which we can browse to refine our hypotheses. We then imagine that there are other important social factors that play into the disease spread, and we realize that we will need to pull information about roads, or schools, or labor statistics. From the GHO site, we click a button that submits a query for datasets available from anywhere in the world related to such subjects that correspond geographically near the location of the emerging outbreak.
We might pause a moment in this story of an emerging outbreak to imagine how a university researcher might pose similar questions a year before the outbreak in an effort to predict its occurrence. Perhaps she is browsing the GBIF portal exploring populations of reptiles as a possible disease vector and realizes that she needs data regarding roads, schools, or labor statistics. From the GBIF website, she clicks a button that submits a query for such datasets available from anywhere in the world that over lap with the range of particular reptiles.