The Cost of Developing Clients That Utilize Public Health Grid Services

A fundamental concept of the public health grid is that services can be developed to perform needed functions and then utilized as needed by public health departments who are connected to the grid.  The grid allows clients to be developed that can utilize a host of grid services to perform a set of tasks needed by their users.  The concept also allows multiple services to exist that perform the same function and provide clients and users with the ability to choose the types of services they need.  This wonderful aspect of the public health grid can also be a detriment.  In a new grid environment of potentially newer, better, faster services that can be become available on the grid frequently, the client applications will need to be able to keep up with the changing grid environment. 

This project will document the processes of developing a prototype disease surveillance system that utilizes multiple grid services.  It will characterize the benefits and disadvantages of providing users with multiple choices of similar services by using two different natural language processing services.  It will then compare how incorporating those services differs from incorporating temporal detection algorithm services. 

The project will show both the benefits the public health grid can provide to both client developers and their users as well an estimate of the costs of working in this new environment.  The prototype disease surveillance system will be demonstrated to show how grid services could be utilized.  The project will also provide recommendations to public health grid service developers that can lower the cost to client developers who will eventually utilize these services.