Software review

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

Richard Newton^1*, Andrew Deonarine² and Lorenz Wernisch¹

• * Corresponding author: Richard Newton richard.newton@mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk

Author Affiliations

¹ MRC Biostatistics Unit, Robinson Way, Cambridge, CB2 0SR, UK

² MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 0QH, UK

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Source Code for Biology and Medicine 2011, 6:6 doi:10.1186/1751-0473-6-6

Published: 1 April 2011

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.