A RDF/XML-Based Description Of Public Health Emergency Resources

With the social progress and economic development, human beings are constantly facing various threats of public health emergencies. The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) which occurred in the spring of 2003 caused great fear and damage to the society, and people felt the danger brought by this emergency to public health, the stability of society and economic development. It also caused people to realize that to tackle such emergencies, the key is to get information about such epidemics. The thesis aims to discuss public health emergencies and the contents, features and descriptions of their information resources.Public health emergencies are epidemics, colonial diseases with no identified reasons, serious food and professional poisoning and other incidents which seriously affect the health of the public. They usually burst out suddenly and cause or may cause serious damages to public health. Public health emergencies are usually paroxysmal, regional, quantitative changing, public, jeopardous, complex and systematic in tackling them.The features of public health emergencies determine those of their resources, which are of high intense information, disorder, repetitive, hard to identify. The outbursts of diseases, epidemics and public health emergencies are usually sudden and cannot forecast. If there were any such outburst, especially the outburst of serious incidents, there would be a large amount of information in newspapers, on TV and the net. Such information would soon come to a peak and level off and then become less as the tackling of the emergencies goes on. The media play an important role in transmitting the information, which is determined by the"social"nature of epidemics. The audience of information is large in number. They can be generally classified into three groups that cover all spheres of people, namely the functional departments of the government, members of health control and the clinic, and the public.