MIDAS Informatics Services Group (ISG)

The MIDAS Informatics Services Group (ISG) develops tools that enhance the abilities of researchers who work with disease transmission models (DTMs). These tools include libraries of structured machine interpretable information to build DTMs, web services, and high-performance compute platforms. Our principal investigators are Mike Wagner, M.D., Ph.D., and Jeremy Espino, M.D., M.S. from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to the University of Pittsburgh, our group includes researchers from Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and Carnegie Mellon. We defined a set of web services, terminology and messaging syntax called Apollo that permits interoperability among the components of a disease-modeling infrastructure:  The Apollo Structured Vocabulary, developed as an OWL specification, defines the terms and relations necessary for interoperation between epidemic simulators and public health application software that interface with these simulators.  The Apollo Schema, developed as an XML schema, defines a set of data types that in combination can define a complex infectious disease scenario for simulation.  The Apollo Web Services define how to programmatically access a Simulator, Synthetic Ecosystem, Library, Visualizer or Translator. A single service, the Broker Service, is the single point of access for end-user applications to these services.

The Apollo Location Service, Ontology Based Catalog and Apollo Library are web applications that have APIs that a modeler can use in their disease transmission models.

Using Apollo, we have created the Simple End User Application (SEUA), Apollo Library, Ontology- based Catalog of Infectious Disease (OBC-ide), and Apollo Location Service (Apollo-LS). We built the SEUA to demonstrate integrated usage of Apollo components. The Apollo Library is a compendium of infectious disease scenarios e.g., pre-epidemic censuses, epidemic curves, and transmission graphs. OBC-ide is an index of infectious disease epidemiology resources that is searchable using inference over indexed terms. Apollo-LS is a database of geographic locations that we built as a temporally coherent source of geopolitical, administrative and epidemic boundaries, e.g., Sudan after July 9th 2011. A user can access these applications via the web (visit www.epimodels.org) or programmatically via web-based APIs. We host networking, education and hack-a-thon events via the MISSION group. The MISSION group holds monthly events that showcase MIDAS researchers, demonstrate ISG services and convey modern software engineering practices. In addition to the above, we provide the MIDAS network with logistical support, data acquisition, model validation, software engineering and quality control services.