Cook County, along with multiple municipalities within the County, needed a way to track and monitor occurrences of the potentially deadly West Nile Virus. The system design called for all data collected by each municipality to be loaded into a central database. Sensitive data fields of each individual dataset needed to be restricted to the other members of the project with access to the application. The project website needed to be restricted from the public domain.

Great Arc developed a Web application that allows groups from individual municipalities in conjunction with Cook County to view ongoing collected data regarding known or suspected cases of the West Nile Virus. Users are able to log on to a secure website and upload a Microsoft Access database. Great Arc’s application allows the upload of the data, and then ports that data into DB2 tables. The DB2 tables drive the Human Cases, Mosquito Traps, and Tested Birds points that are represented on the map. By allowing authorized users of the system to upload their data, the most current results of testing are available to all those who access it. Additionally, the spatial data being displayed in the Map is set up and configured using the DB2 version of ArcSDE. Using ESRI’s ArcIMS software in conjunction with MapXtender, Great Arc has developed an application that will give each user the opportunity to view different datasets. These datasets are displayed based on preset criteria with the data being filtered using SQL Statements in the map. The following datasets are displayed in the application.

• Human
  • All Cases
  • Year to Selected Week
  • Last 4 Weeks
• Mosquito Trap Points
  • Positive Traps
  • Current Week
  • Two Week History
• Positive Mosquito Pools
  • Year to Selected Week
  • Year to Current Date
  • Last 4 Weeks
• Birds
  • Birds Tested Positive

Map display tools include Zoom In/Out, Pan, Zoom Scroll, Zoom to Map Extent, Zoom Previous, and Zoom Next. A Locator Map tool is also included that shows the area of extent for the current view within the full map extent. The Identify Tool is used to pick a point feature on the map to have its information displayed in a separate screen.

Finally, the application provides users with graphs on various datasets being displayed in the application:

• The number of human cases by week of onset
• Number of positive pools by week
• Percent of positive pools by week