NRAAH

Requirement #2: Create areas of surveillance on a map based on disease information.

Once disease data is entered in the National Registry of Aquatic Animal Diseases, users need to create areas of surveillance which indicate the presence or absence of disease in a given area. This determines where the Department of Fisheries and Oceans should conduct surveys, and provides information to the World Organisation for Animal Health (Office international des épizooties) about the occurrence and distribution of animal diseases across Canada.

This aspect of the project had several constraints:

• Data needed to be secure;
• Rules-based validation based on spatial criteria;
• Spatial expertise;
• Web-based;
• Simple for users to create.

NRAAH developers came up with the following solutions:

• Oracle9i is used for storing the spatial data.
  
• The surveillance areas were set up in a transactional web feature service used by the NRAAH Web Feature Editor.
  
• The web-based editing tool allows users to view a web map service image, draw polygons on the screen representing zones and commit them to the database through the web feature service. By using a web map service, animal health program experts can visualize information from a variety of sources, which assists them in making decisions and ensuring that the surveillance zones are accurate.

This graphic illustrates how the NRAAH WFS Feature Editor is used to create surveillance zones.