An Interactive Visualization Tool Built Using Google Maps

PURPOSE: Geographic visualizations can be a powerful tool to help health researchers and decision-makers to take measures during catastrophic and epidemic events like Ebola. The project is a web-based geo-visualization tool to visualize and compare the spread of Ebola in the West African countries Ivory Coast and Senegal. PROCEDURES: The tool is built using Google Maps JavaScript API. This is an interactive tool that helps in visualizing time series geospatial information. In this project the D4D data sets are used to depict the spread of Ebola. The project uses the data from Orange telecom; which gave access to its data, containing 300,000 records of anonymous, random users. The tool is built using the technologies Java, JavaScript, Java Servlets, JSP, HTML, and CSS. Heat maps are built for the time series data for a period of 150 days to discover the places where Ebola has most spread in number. OUTCOME: The tool was built to successfully visualize and compare the spread of the Ebola using heat maps. We are also using other ways to better visualize the data. Furthermore, the tool can also be used to visualize any data set containing geospatial information. IMPACT: The application could be a powerful tool that can help healthcare researchers and decision-makers in building mitigation strategies