Tracing patients' PLOD with mobile phones: Mitigation of epidemic risks through patients' locational open data

Abstract: In the cases when public health authorities confirm a patient with highly contagious disease, they release the summaries about patient locations and travel information. However, due to privacy concerns, these releases do not include the detailed data and typically comprise the information only about commercial facilities and public transportation used by the patients. We addressed this problem and proposed to release the patient location data as open data represented in a structured form of the information described in press releases. Therefore, residents would be able to use these data for automated estimation of the potential risks of contacts combined with the location information stored in their mobile phones. This paper proposes the design of the open data based on Resource Description Framework (RDF), and performs a preliminary evaluation of the first draft of the specification followed by a discussion on possible future directions.