Most countries do not report national notifiable disease data in a machine-readable format. Data are often in the form of a file that contains text, tables and graphs summarizing weekly or monthly disease counts. This presents a problem when information is needed for more data intensive approaches to epidemiology, biosurveillance and public health. While most nations likely store incident data in a machine-readable format, governments are often hesitant to share data openly for a variety of reasons that include technical, political, economic, and motivational issues1.
