Exposing public health surveillance data using existing standards.

With the growing use of information technologies, an increased volume of data is produced in Public Health Surveillance, enabling utilization of new data sources and analysis methods. Public health and research will benefit from the use of data standards promoting harmonization and data description through metadata. No data standard has yet been universally accepted for exchanging public health data. In this work, we implemented two existing standards eligible to expose public health data: Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange - Health Domain (SDMX-HD) proposed by the World Health Organization and Open Data Protocol (OData) proposed by Microsoft Corp. SDMX-HD promotes harmonization through controlled vocabulary and predefined data structure suitable for public health but requires important investment, while OData, a generic purpose standard, proposes a simple way to expose data with minimal documentation and end-user integration tools. The two solutions were implemented and are publicly available at http://sdmx.sentiweb.fr and http://odata.sentiweb.fr. These solutions show that data sharing and interoperability are already possible in Public Health Surveillance.