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ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2012. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
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ISDS 2012 Conference Abstracts

Biosurveillance Adaptable Framework for Teaming,
Exploration and Reuse (BioAFTER)
Timothy Dasey* and Lars Fiedler

Chemical and Biological Defense Systems, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, USA

Introduction
Next-generation software environments for disease surveillance

will need to have several important characteristics, among which are
collaboration and search and discovery features, access to various
data sets, and a variety of analytic methods. However, perhaps the
most important feature is the least often mentioned – the ability to
have the system adapt over time without high reengineering cost. The
public health community cannot afford software redesigns every few
years as data sets expand, analysis needs evolve, and software defi-
ciencies are exposed. In addition to the need to adapt an environment
over longer time periods, epidemiologists have high variability in
their day-to-day needs that require adaptability over short time peri-
ods as well. Each outbreak or health situation has unique aspects, and
analysts need to be able to bring in data and methods unique to that
situation that may not be easily anticipated a priori. 

The most common approach to increasing reusability and de-
creasing upgrade costs are open architecture software frameworks
such as Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). If well implemented,
SOAs can significantly reduce software upgrade costs by allowing
services (a software module) to be easily swapped out for improve-
ments or supplemented with additional services. SOAs can help with
long-term adaptability, but are not useful in short-term adaptability,
since the software development team must be engaged in each cycle.
Another approach is to include an App Store. Unfortunately, App
Stores for government use have often been disappointing. Apps can
tend to be quite simple, and even slight changes from what is pro-
grammed – a predictable situation with the variability seen in disease
surveillance realm - will result in an epidemiologist having to get a
software developer to make them a new App.

Methods
Instead of the power for adaptability remaining solely in the con-

trol of software developers, that power needs to also be in the hands
of the users themselves. The BioAFTER project builds upon SOA
and App Store concepts by allowing Apps to be strung together in
unique combinations, according to the problem of the day. As exam-
ples, these Apps can be data access programs, data quality editing,
algorithms of various complexity, or reporting and visualization mod-
ules. The App Store feature allows software developers, including the
public health academic community, to add new methods to the envi-
ronment, while the composability feature allows ad-hoc combina-
tions of Apps to suit particular situations. 

The user composability feature would be of limited value without
collaboration features in the environment. We expect that only a sub-
set of users will make the effort to do composition. The rest will want
to learn from those “super users”. The BioAFTER environment al-
lows data, Apps (including new Apps created by compositions of
other Apps), and analysis results to be shared with the entire epi-
demiological community, or with a set of “friends” or people with
common interests. Analysts who use various Apps can rate their
value. The environment is intended to allow search and discovery of
Apps, expertise, or even people who may have needed expertise or
experience with similar situations (these features are in development).

Results
The motivations and features of the BioAFTER environment will

be described at the ISDS Conference, and a brief demonstration of the
capabilities on an example use case will be given.

Keywords
biosurveillance; collaboration; discovery; composition; adaptability

Acknowledgments

This work is sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of De-
fense for Research and Engineering (ASD(R&E)) under Air Force Con-
tract #FA8721-05-C-0002. Opinions, interpretations, recommendations
and conclusions are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed
by the United States Government.

*Timothy Dasey
E-mail: TimD@LL.mit.edu

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 5(1):e201, 2013