NBIC Biofeeds: A Digital Tool for Open Source Biosurveillance across Federal Agencies

ObjectiveThe National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) isdeveloping a scalable, flexible open source data collection, analysis,and dissemination tool to support biosurveillance operations bythe U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its federalinteragency partners.IntroductionThe NBIC integrates, analyzes, and distributes key informationabout health and disease events to help ensure the nation’s responsesare well-informed, save lives, and minimize economic impact. NBICserves as a bridge between Federal, State, Local, Territorial, andTribal entities to conduct biosurveillance across human, animal, plant,and environmental domains. The integration of information enablesearly warning and shared situational awareness of biological eventsto inform critical decisions directing response and recovery efforts.To meet its mission objectives, NBIC utilizes a variety of datasets, including open source information, to provide comprehensivecoverage of biological events occurring across the globe. NBICBiofeeds is a digital tool designed to improve the efficiency ofreviewing and analyzing large volumes of open source reportingby biosurveillance analysts on a daily basis; moreover, the systemprovides a mechanism to disseminate tailored feeds allowing NBIC tobetter meet the specific information needs of individual, interagencypartners. The tool is currently under development by the Departmentof Energy (DOE), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)and it is in a testing and evaluation phase supported by NBICbiosurveillance subject matter experts. Integration with the DefenseThreat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Biosurveillance Ecosystem(BSVE) is also underway. NBIC Biofeeds Version 1 is expected tobe fully operational in Fiscal Year 2017.MethodsThe PNNL is applying agile methodology to streamline the buildof NBIC Biofeeds to specifications required for operational use byNBIC and its federal interagency partners. Biosurveillance, analytics,and system engineering subject matter experts provide guidance onthe implementation of features in the tool to ensure functionalityaligns with operational workflows and production support. PNNL isleveraging software from a previous government effort to repurposethe technology to meet NBIC needs. NBIC Biofeeds incorporatesthe open source, document-orientated MongoDB database to captureuser- and system-generated metadata on hundreds of thousandsof records, in part, to establish baselines to aid prospective andretrospective anal