Table 2.

Some well-known health-related mashups.

Site name/Address	Brief description
Google Earth	Typically known as a world visualization website, Google Earth features time-enabled maps in order to track worldwide flu trends by using google.com symptom search queries.
Healthmap.org	HealthMap, led by a multidisciplinary team in Boston’s Children’s Hospital, uses informal data sources for real-time world-wide disease surveillance and outbreak monitoring.
Sickweather.com	Sickweather uses a patent-pending algorithm to aggregate data from Facebook and Twitter along with self-reported data in order to forecast, track, and map a number of illnesses around the world.
Whoissick.org	Whoissick aims to provide current and local sickness information to the public. Although it was one of the first disease visualization mashups, today the site has little data and is likely to be defunct in the near future. The main reason is a lack of a community, which provides data to the site. Whoissick also does not reveal which data sources it uses to visualize disease and symptom outbreaks.
etest.vbi.vt.edu/etblast3	eTBLAST is an article search engine that looks for peer reviewed articles, such as those on PubMed, which resemble any block of text. Thus, one can write a paragraph and look for articles, which will support the premises noted. This mashup is a project of the Innovation Laboratory at Virginia’s Bioinformatics Institute.