Creating web applications for spatial epidemiological analysis and mapping in R using Rwui

Abstract

Background: Creating a user friendly web based application which executes an R script allows physicians, epidemiologists, and others unfamiliar with the statistical language to perform powerful statistical analyses easily. The geographic mapping of data is an important tool in spatial epidemiological analysis, and the R project includes many tools for such analyses, but few for visualization. Hence, web applications that run R for epidemiological analysis need to be able to present the results in a geographic format.Results: Rwui is a web application for creating web based applications for running R scripts. We describe updates to Rwui that enable it to create web applications for R scripts which return the results of the analysis to the web page as geographic maps.Conclusions: Rwui enables statisticians to create web applications for R scripts without the need to learn web programming. Creating a web application provides users access to an R based analysis without the need to learn R. Recent updates to Rwui have increased its applicability in the field of spatial epidemiological analysis. © 2011 Newton et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.