Historical Background
Infectious disease outbreaks are critical threats to public health and national security (Damianos et al. 2002; Hufnagel et al. 2004). With greatly expanded travel and trade, infectious diseases can quickly spread across large areas causing major epidemics. Efficient computerized reasoning about epidemics is essential to detect their outbreak and nature, to provide fast medical aid to affected people and animals, and to prevent their further spread.
Epidemiological data are spatiotemporal data, that is, they have a spatial distribution that changes over time (Clements and Pfeiffer 2009; Ozdenerol et al. 2013; Sintchenko and Gallego 2009). Epidemiological data are also recursive in nature. That means that the best predictions of the spread of infections are based on earlier situations. These characteristics of epidemics make them special in terms of geographic information systems, which...