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GIS Research in Longwood Medical Area

GIS at Harvard University

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Sources of spatial data

Scripts

Spatial Statistics

Links

These are just a few links that I have found to be helpful. I have not attempted to create a detailed listing of all the links that might be useful to health researchers using GIS. If you would like to suggest additional links e-mail me at sjmelly@hsph.harvard.edu.

Public Health & GIS
Center for Disease Control, National Center for Health Statistics - GIS and Public Health
National Cancer Institute GIS
Tools for ArcMap from NCI
GIS in Public Health (ATSDR)
The Geographic Information System for the Long Island Breast Cancer Study
Environmental Health Advanced Systems Laboratory - Colorado State University
GIS for Health & Human Services - ESRI
The Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project Monograph

General GIS
Penn State GIS Resource Documents
GIS.com
Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) - establishes standards for metadata
http://www.cnr.colostate.edu/class_info/nr502/mainpage/course_mainpage.html - information about projections and coordinate systems
ET Spatial Techniques Source for "Easy Calculate" - code that can be used with the ArcGIS Field Calculator and ET GeoWizards a set of functions that can be used with ArcGIS.
Geographical Analysis recently published a series of articles highlighting recent developments in spatial analysis software for the social sciences (Volume 38, Issue 1, 2006, available electronically at Harvard). This issue was inspired by a 2002 workshop sponsored by The Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS) at UC Santa Barbara.

Sources of Spatial Data
Census 2000 TIGER files
Harvard Map Collection
US Geologic Survey Digital Data
MassGIS
Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access
Geography Network
The Boston Atlas

Health & Demographic Data
Massachusetts Institute for Social and Economic Research
MassSTATS
National Center for Health Statistics
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health

Mortality Atlases
National Cancer Institute
National Center for Health Statistics

Geocoding
Mapping Analytics - one of several companies that provide geocoding services

Spatial Statistics Sites
GeoBUGS software package- GeoBUGS has been developed by a team at the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health of Imperial College at St Mary's Hospital, London. It is an add-on to WinBUGS that fits spatial models and produces a range of maps as output. Bayesian inference is used to spatially smooth the standardized incidence/mortality ratios using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. GeoBUGS implements models for data that are collected within discrete regions (not at the individual level) and smoothing is done based on Markov random field models for the neighborhood structure of the regions relative to each other.
Fields software package for R -implements thin plate spline fitting and kriging
Classical and Bayesian implementations of kriging- using the geoR and geoS packages for R and S-plus, respectively
Head-Bang PC Software "Head-banging" is a weighted two-dimensional median-based smoothing algorithm available from NCI.