H1N1 Response

I just realized that I haven't made any posts about our H1N1 response. The grid team has been working with the rest of NCPHI preparing for the flu season and the H1N1 surveillance that will be required. H1N1 response has been consuming a lot of all of our time.

I've been working on a data format that is modeled after the DiSTRIBuTE data use agreement's Appendix A that is a form of "GIPSE Lite" that defines a CSV format that can be used for immediate H1N1 surveillance. The data format is available on the wiki.

This format can be used in the "Producer-Collector" style of GIPSE architecture where data sources wish to provide daily data feeds that produce a report for transfer to a collector node (such as DiSTRIBuTE or CDC's GIPSE store repository). This is showing to be a viable option for sites that do not wish to host a query service, which requires a dedicated web service host with inbound access on port 443.

This is also helpful as this is the first DUA from CDC I'm aware of that specifically addresses summary and aggregate data collection and transfer.