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Mantle: An Open Source Platform for One Health Biosurveillance and Research

Description

The One Health approach suggests that humans, animals, and the environment are closely tied together. Human interaction with wildlife and the environment contributes to increased risk for human, plant, and animal infectious disease outbreaks. Since human, animal, and ecosystem health are linked, interdisciplinary and holistic approaches are needed to prevent future infectious disease outbreaks. Despite the movement towards One Health, the software currently available to manage, analyze, and communicate the vast amount of One Health data is grossly inadequate. One Health data are continually growing in size and complexity, and new technologies must be developed to address the magnitude of the problem. Furthermore, the desire of single entities to control and leverage information for greater personal and organizational wealth and power directly opposes the goals of biosurveillance, One Health, and science. Open access and open source software are needed to address these complex One Health problems, and to improve data accessibility, interoperability, and information communication.

Objective

Mantle will be an open-source, cloud-compatible platform for storing, studying, and sharing data on infectious diseases across plants, animals, and humans. It will meet the needs of three groups of users: scientists, policymakers, and the general public. For scientists, Mantle will make datasets portable and connected. Scientists will be able to upload datasets to the Mantle website or collect data from the field using a mobile app. Users in Mantle will be able to easily make datasets entirely private, publicly accessible, or shared with specific users or groups. 

Submitted by rmathes on