Re: Global Cancer Epidemiology Data

To demonstrate the GIS cancer data mashup capability. I created a Yahoo 
pipe to extract a tabular dataset (from the NCI GIS site) that lists the 
death rates for all types of cancers by states 
(http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=MitwL2Fz3BG8l70pJhOy0Q). It 
filters the data based on a user-input threshold against the annual 
death rates. One feature of Yahoo Pipes is that it can feed geographic 
data output to Google Maps. When the pipe is run, a Map showing that 
states that have cancer death rates above the specified threshold are 
shown on the map. Then we can use the pipe to export the map output to a 
KML file (a standard XML format used by Google Maps/Earth).

I found that there is a web site called geocommons that  allow people to 
annotate and share their maps. So I uploaded the cancer profile map to 
geocommons. I found there are maps posted on geocommons which involve 
different types of environmental data. In addition, geocommons provides 
an interface that allows different maps to be combined. Attached is a 
screen shot of geocommons showing a map mashing up the cancer profile 
data (red dots correspond to the states) and the pollution of streams 
and rivers in US (in this case the number of streams/rivers is shown in 
the form of a heat map). Notice that most of the states with high cancer 
death rates are within the fire zone! This is an example of 
geographically correlating cancer data with environmental data.

It would be great if sites like geocommons can become semantic web 
aware. HCLS may have the potential to bring web 2.0 and web 3.0 
(semantic web) together!?

-Kei

Susie Stephens wrote:

> Matt, Kei,
>  
> Would you be able to provide a summary of the Globocan/ Cancer Mondial 
> data and the GIS data respectively during the BioRDF call on Oct. 15?
>  
> Cheers,
>
> Susie
>
>
>  
> On 10/5/07, *Kei Cheung* <kei.cheung@yale.edu 
> <mailto:kei.cheung@yale.edu>> wrote:
>
>
>     Another GIS/Cancer of interest: http://gis.cancer.gov/
>
>     -Kei
>
>     Matt Williams wrote:
>     >
>     > Dear All,
>     >
>     > Further to my previous email, a different source of data might
>     be the
>     > Globocan/ Cancer Mondial data on Cancer Epidemiology from IARC
>     > ( http://www-dep.iarc.fr/).
>     >
>     > Again, to make value from this, I think we would need to link it
>     with
>     > other things; One obvious route would be through GIS, but this
>     is an
>     > area I know little about.
>     >
>     > Matt
>
>
>
>