Abstract
BackgroundSince prehistory to present times and despite a rough combat against it, malaria remains a concern for human beings. While evolutions of science and technology through times allowed for some infectious diseases eradication in the 20th century, malaria resists.ObjectivesThis review aims at assessing how Internet and web technologies are used in fighting malaria. Precisely, how do malaria fighting actors profit from these developments, how do they deal with ensuing phenomena, such as the increase of data volume, and did these technologies bring new opportunities for fighting malaria?MethodsEleven web platforms linked to spatio-temporal malaria information are reviewed, focusing on data, metadata, web services and categories of users.ResultsThough the web platforms are highly heterogeneous the review reveals that the latest advances in web technologies are underused. Information are rarely updated dynamically, metadata catalogues are absent, web services are more and more used, but rarely standardized, and websites are mainly dedicated to scientific communities, essentially researchers.ConclusionImprovement of systems interoperability, through standardization, is an opportunity to be seized in order to allow real time information exchange and online multisource data analysis. To facilitate multidisciplinary/multiscale studies, the web of linked data and the semantic web innovations can be used in order to formalize the different view points of actors involved in the combat against malaria. By doing so, new malaria fighting strategies could take place, to tackle the bottlenecks listed in the United Nation Millennium Development Goals reports, but also specific issues highlighted by the World Health Organization such as malaria elimination in international borders.
Highlights
Introduction of informationFour websites (36%) clearly make efforts for democratizing access to scientific information by giving essential keys for interpreting the displayed results; i.e. it is possible to visualize jointly the results and a short text explaining them
To facilitate multidisciplinary/ multiscale studies, the web of linked data and the semantic web innovations can be used in order to formalize the different view points of actors involved in the combat against malaria
New malaria fighting strategies could take place, to tackle the bottlenecks listed in the United Nation Millennium Development Goals reports, and specific issues highlighted by the World Health Organization such as malaria elimination in international borders
Summary
Four websites (36%) clearly make efforts for democratizing access to scientific information by giving essential keys for interpreting the displayed results; i.e. it is possible to visualize jointly the results and a short text explaining them. This is the case of a, b, j and k that the civil society category of user may consult. The malaria MDG target 6C has been reached, malaria reasonably remained in the new United Nations schedule for the 15 years called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) [3]. This information is to be recorded in the so-called metadata, data about data, in order to facilitate its exploitation and to promote an objective and responsible use of it
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