Epidemiological modeling for infectious disease is useful for disease management and routine implementation needs to be facilitated through better description of models in an operational context. A standardized model characterization process that allows selection or making manual comparisons of available models and their results is currently lacking. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has developed a comprehensive framework that can be used to characterize an infectious disease model in an operational context.

The early detection of outbreaks of diseases is one of the most challenging objectives of epidemiological surveillance systems. In order to achieve this goal, the primary foundation is using those big surveillance data for understanding and controlling the spatiotemporal variability of disease through populations. Typically, public health’s surveillance system would generate data with the big data characteristics of high volume, velocity, and variety.

Social media messages are often short, informal, and ungrammatical. They frequently involve text, images, audio, or video, which makes the identification of useful information difficult. This complexity reduces the efficacy of standard information extraction techniques1. However, recent advances in NLP, especially methods tailored to social media2, have shown promise in improving real-time PH surveillance and emergency response3. Surveillance data derived from semantic analysis combined with traditional surveillance processes has potential to improve event detection and characterization.