| Project Title:
iSHARE Project: Extending and Expanding
Capacity in HDSS Data Sharing among Three African
HDSS Sites in Synchronization with the Existing Data
Sharing Platform among Three Asian HDSS Sites
The phrase "Health and Demographic Surveillance
System" (HDSS), means to keep close track of the population
dynamics of an identified area over a long period.
This process is known as the longitudinal data capture.
Longitudinal data set helps in identifying trends
and pattern in population dynamics with respect to
various parameters and pointers. HDSS data repository
is a data mine in its own way. These data repositories
need to be put on a common data sharing platform for
higher research activities where by researchers can
use inbuilt statistical analysis tools or vendor supplied
statistical tools to identify data trends and patterns,
in short, building a data warehouse for data mining.
The present proposal is developed taking the example
of HDSS Vadu, a member of the INDEPT Network (www.indepth-network.org),
a network of about 34 HDSS in Africa and Asia. The
participating sites proceed with belief that it should
be a social and professional responsibility to share
data with the community at large mainly because this
data is actually collected from the public/granted
money. Data sharing would foster effective use of
available data for scientific progress and help bring
about transparency in scientific inquiry. Use of such
available data by others would also allow verification
and refinement of findings more economically and effectively.
HDSS Vadu in collaboration with its technical partner
the International Institute of Information Technology,
Pune (I2IT), an academic institution of par excellence,
joined hands with two more INDEPTH member sites in
Aisa namely the HDSS Wosera in Papua New Guinea and
Kanchanaburi HDSS in Thailand worked over two years
to develop a prototype for data sharing among the
INDEPTH sites. As part of this exercise, some common
variables were decided for sharing by the three sites
including the births, death, in migration and the
out migrations. For sharing this, a prototype was
developed by the I2IT and this entire project is uploaded
for sharing by the INDEPTH Network on independently
created website www.indepth-datasharing.org. This
website allows registration based restriction for
data access to users.
Extending The HDSS
Solution To Three African Sites:
The purpose of this project is to extend the existing
data sharing platform among the three Asian participating
HDSS sites viz., Vadu - India, Wosera - Papua New
Guinea and Kanchanaburi - Thailand (www.indepth-datasharing.org)
to three African HDSS sites including the Madu DSS
in Tanzania, Dikgale and Agincourt DSS in South Africa.
This project will be implemented in two phases, viz.:
a. Creation of a software based solution for the HDSS
for individual participating sites inline with the
existing solutions of Vadu, Kanchanaburi and Wosera
b. Expanding the existing data sharing platform www.indepth-datasharing.org
with the new sites' data
This INDEPTH Date sharing project is now renamed as
the INDEPTH-Network Sharing and Access Repository
(iSHARE). |
