System for infectious disease information sharing and analysis: design and evaluation

Motivated by the importance of infectious disease informatics (IDI) and the challenges to IDI system development and data sharing, we design and implement BioPortal, a Web-based IDI system that integrates cross-jurisdictional data to support information sharing, analysis, and visualization in public health. In this paper, we discuss general challenges in IDI, describe BioPortal's architecture and functionalities, and highlight encouraging evaluation results obtained from a controlled experiment that focused on analysis accuracy, task performance efficiency, user information satisfaction, system usability, usefulness, and ease of use.