The PID Life Index: an interactive tool to measure the status of the PID healthcare environment in any given country

Background The “Primary Immunodeficiencies (PIDs) principles of care” were published in 2014 as the gold standard for care of patients with PIDs, setting a common goal for stakeholders to ensure that patients with PID have access to appropriate care and good quality of life. Since then, IPOPI (the International Patient Organisation for Primary Immunodeficiencies), has been working with national PID patient organisations as well as collaborating with scientific and medical institutions and experts to bring these principles closer to the day-to-day life of individuals with PIDs. Method The six PID Principles of Care were revised to consider advances in the field, as well as political developments that had occurred after their initial publication in 2014. Based on this revision the list was updated, and a new principle was added. The six established principles were: diagnosis, treatment, universal health coverage, specialised centres, national patient organisations and registries. Each principle was structured and measured through a series of criteria, and was given the same weight, as they have been considered to all be equally important. Specific weights were attributed to the criteria depending on their relevance and importance to quantify the principle. The index was translated into a survey for data collection: initially involving data from selected countries for a pilot, followed by integration of data from IPOPI’s national member organisations and key countries. Results The PID Life Index was developed in 2020 to assess the status of the PID environment and the implementation of the 6 principles worldwide. The Index allows for benchmarking countries either according to a set of principles and criteria or based on the user’s preferences. This can be displayed in an interactive map or through a data visualisation system. Conclusion The PID Life Index has been developed successfully and has potential to become an important source of information for PID stakeholders, to increase awareness and information as well as support advocacy initiatives on PIDs nationally, regionally or globally.

Motivating Sustainable Recycling Practices Through Persuasive Technologies

Despite the importance of recycling in the current and pressing context of preserving the environment, it is still not adopted by all of us. Several mobile tools have become available with the aim of sensitizing and motivating the population towards sustainable behaviours, with limitations in information availability and in integration with formal as well as informal sources. Moreover, persuasive characteristics, such as the use of gamification also need improvement towards raising competitiveness (and awareness) in the targeted community. The authors thus propose a mobile responsive gamified application for motivating recycling attitudes centred around an interactive map, supported by the curated data of one of the reference companies of the environmental sector in the region. The app includes collaborative persuasive elements as well as validation processes for crowdsourced content proposed by the community. The results of an evaluation process, with promising results, are described.

Interactive Map of Coronavirus Spread in Croatia

At the beginning of any crisis, including pandemics, it is very important to provide timely information to expert headquarters at the local and global level so that they can make daily decisions about measures and behavior of the population. Support for this can be a combination of analytical and statistical data together with the locations from which these data were collected. Part of the cartographic visualization deals precisely with the ways of designing and visual presentation based on which it would be clear to the user where the biggest hotspots and the biggest changes are compared to the previous period. The paper describes the origin and proposal of the original dashboard for monitoring the COVID pandemic in Croatia. The dashboard contains and combines thematic data and displays it with the layout and design carefully determined. The goal is for the data to be implemented as soon as it is available to the public. Similar works available on the Internet are also shown. The entire course of making the dashboard for the COVID pandemic and dissemination data is described, as well as data sources, software, problems encountered and solutions.

Web technologies in cartographic support of geological exploration

Web technologies are now an integral part of the implementation of research work in various branches of science. The geological and geophysical direction is no exception, where the planning and execution of geological and geophysical surveys depend on the accuracy, reliability and relevance of the transmitted information.The article deals with the possibilities of web technologies for cartographic support of geological exploration – a complex of scientific and production works, designed to determine the industrial significance of mineral deposits (ore, hydrocarbon, etc.). Examples are given of the use of geoportal solutions for the publication of data on the territory of study.Taking into account the current level of web technologies development, a proprietary web-service was created to provide operational access to geodata during geological and geophysical work. The presented solution is implemented using PostgreSQL DBMS, PostGIS geospatial data processing module, Leaflet JavaScript library. The resulting interactive map allows to perform operational monitoring of field crews during seismic exploration, provides information on the stages of data processing and interpretation. Also it allows to implement a unified geoinformation space for joint work of specialists from different industries.

Visualizing Spatiotemporal Epidemic Clusters on a Map-based Dashboard: A case study of early COVID-19 cases in Singapore

Spatiotemporal distribution of the epidemic data plays an important role in its understanding and prediction. In order to understand the transmission patterns of infectious diseases in a more intuitive way, many works applied various visualizations to show the epidemic datasets. However, most of them focus on visualizing the epidemic information at the overall level such as the confirmed counts each country, while spending less effort on powering user to effectively understand and reason the very large and complex epidemic datasets through flexible interactions. In this paper, the authors proposed a novel map-based dashboard for visualizing and analyzing spatiotemporal clustering patterns and transmission chains of epidemic data. We used 102 confirmed cases officially reported by the Ministry of Health in Singapore as the test dataset. This experiment shown that the well-designed and interactive map-based dashboard is effective in shorten the time that users required to mine the spatiotemporal characteristics and transmission chains behind the textual and numerical epidemic data.

Mapka: A map application for working with corpora of spoken Czech

A new interactive map-based web application named Mapka was published by the Institute of the Czech National Corpus in 2020. It aims to serve linguists, as well as schools and the general public, and it features various functions described in this paper. Mapka was designed as a supplement to the CNC spoken corpora, starting with the DIALEKT corpus (more to come in the future). Its main function is to display various types of territorial division (primarily in terms of dialect, but also administrative) and networks of localities associated with the corpus. The main dialect regions are provided with overviews of their typical dialectal features and two samples of dialectal discourse – one slightly historical and one contemporary. The application offers the possibility of searching for municipalities, plotting the points on the map and creating a custom map. The paper concludes with future prospects concerning an enhanced and improved version of the application.

Agglomerative Clustering of Growing Squares

We study an agglomerative clustering problem motivated by interactive glyphs in geo-visualization. Consider a set of disjoint square glyphs on an interactive map. When the user zooms out, the glyphs grow in size relative to the map, possibly with different speeds. When two glyphs intersect, we wish to replace them by a new glyph that captures the information of the intersecting glyphs. We present a fully dynamic kinetic data structure that maintains a set of n disjoint growing squares. Our data structure uses $$O\bigl (n \log n \log \log n\bigr )$$ O ( n log n log log n ) space, supports queries in worst case $$O\bigl (\log ^2 n\bigr )$$ O ( log 2 n ) time, and updates in $$O\bigl (\log ^5 n\bigr )$$ O ( log 5 n ) amortized time. This leads to an $$O\bigl (n\,\alpha (n)\log ^5 n\bigr )$$ O ( n α ( n ) log 5 n ) time algorithm to solve the agglomerative clustering problem. This is a significant improvement over the current best $$O\bigl (n^2\bigr )$$ O ( n 2 ) time algorithms.