The World Wide Web provides a tremendous amount of information about diseases and their environments, and much of the information has its geographic contexts. Effectively exploring such information, however, presents a significant challenge to GIScience research because the data is often ill-organized on the web. Commonly used search engines such as Google can only provide a list of raw web pages which often do not contribute to discovering knowledge about the diseases. In this thesis, a geospatial web approach will be developed to efficiently exploring online epidemiological information. A geospatial web organizes information based on the geographic and ontological relationships rather than merely key words. We will focus on news articles about the foot and mouth disease and construct an ontology that specifies the relationship between relevant diseases, geographical terms, social and economical concepts, and cultural contexts.
A prototype of this geospatial web approach will contain several components, such as a list of a few foot and mouth disease news, a map showing where these news articles are reported or happened, an ontology graph of this domain, a list of news with topics related to the term we are searching and a list of news happened nearby. This prototype not only allows people to explore closely related information in terms of semantics and locations but provides an effective way to visualize and analyze such information.