Development of Area Health Informatics : A Quantitative Comparative Area Studies regarding Disease Structure

本研究旨在将信息方法应用于区域研究，实现各研究领域研究成果的共享和系统化的新手段。我们将这种新范式称为“区域信息学”。为了实现区域研究方法和结果的定量、客观和可重复性，我们认识到事件时空属性和词汇关联的重要性，并开发了一些量化处理它们的信息工具。我们还收集了来自泰国和八山群岛的各种资料（例如疾病数据，如疟疾，环境数据，如气候，社会经济数据，如收入和职业），并将我们的信息工具应用于这些数据。

This research aimed to apply information methods to area studies to realize new means of sharing and systematizing research results of various study domains in the studies. We term this new paradigm "areainformatics." To realize quantitativeness, objectiveness and reproducibility of research methods and results in area studies, we recognized the importance of spatiotemporal attributes of events and that of association of vocabularies, and developed some information tools to treat them quantitatively. We also collected various materials from Thailand and Yaeyama Islands (e.g., disease data such as malaria, environment data such as climates, socioeconomic data such as income and occupation), and applied our information tools to these data.