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The Medical Information System (MedISys) is a fully automatic 24/7 public health surveillance system monitoring human and animal infectious diseases and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) threats in open-source media. In this article, we explain the technology behind MedISys, describing the processing chain from the definition of news sources, scraping and grabbing articles from the internet, text mining, event extraction with the Pattern-based Understanding and Learning System (PULS, developed by the University of Helsinki), news clustering and alerting, to the display of results. The web interface and service applications are shown from a user’s perspective. Users can display world maps in which event locations are highlighted as well as statistics on the reporting about diseases, countries and combinations thereof and can apply filters for language, disease or location or filters with orthogonal categories, e.g. outbreaks, via their browser. Specific entities such as persons, organizations and locations are identified automatically. |
