Conclusion
In this research, we developed a HERXML schema to support Web-based representation of health data based on XML specifications, with consideration of semantic, geometric, and graphical aspects of health information. HERXML has been used by the New Brunswick Lung Association in the sharing of health representation information. It provides a suitable way to represent health information for sharing with other users through the Web. The HERXML can be utilized by health practitioners, policy makers, and the public in many areas such as disease etiology, health planning, health resource management, health promotion and health education. The concept definitions and the richness of the vocabularies under the three categories of semantic, geometrical, and cartographical still need to be improved to meet the requirements from the growing users. New application and services has been implemented in CGDI for health surveillance, with many standard WMS, WFS, and WPS services. WPS provides a solution for publishing the health processing and mapping tools online. In our case study, we enabled the online heath data processing and sharing, as well as the reusability and interoperability of health services. The implemented application and services facilitate access to maps and visualization of disease prevalence, mortalities, and determinants of health, transmission patterns, and components of healthcare response. This research brought a new solution in better health data representation and initial exploration of the Web-based processing of health information, and will further promote the growth and enrichment of the CGDI in the public health sector. Our future work will be on the improvement of comprehensiveness of HERXML in health data representation and investigation of data transmission for WPS services.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Authors' contributions
All authors participated in the design of the HERXML, and the implementation of the architecture for processing and sharing health information. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Acknowledgements
This research work has received the financial support from GeoConnections secretariat of Natural Resources Canada for a project titled "Development of Web Application and Services within the CGDI framework for Community Health Programs of the New Brunswick Lung Association". Authors also thank for the project partners: New Brunswick Emergency Measures Organization, Faculty of Computer Science (UNB), and CARIS for their contributions to this research.
Int J Health Geogr © 2009 BioMed Central, Ltd.
Gao et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Cite this: Towards Web-based Representation And Processing Of Health Information - Medscape - Jan 21, 2009.
