infoveillance: Web-based data for public health surveillance

Collect web-based data to track public health trends, behaviors, and disease outbreaks in real time. Part of the rtemis ecosystem.

Data sources

• GDELT (DOC 2.0 API): query_gdelt() searches global online news by keyword and returns matching articles, coverage timelines (volume, tone, language, source country), or a tone histogram as a data.table.

library(infoveillance)

# Articles from the last week mentioning both terms
query_gdelt(c("measles", "outbreak"), timespan = "1w")

# Daily coverage volume mentioning either phrase, English-language sources only
query_gdelt(
  c("bird flu", "avian influenza"),
  match = "any",
  mode = "timelinevol",
  start_datetime = as.Date("2025-01-01"),
  end_datetime = as.Date("2025-03-31"),
  source_lang = "english"
)

Installation

Latest version from r-universe

pak::repo_add(rtemis = "https://rtemis-org.r-universe.dev")
pak::pak("infoveillance")

or using install.packages:

install.packages(
  "infoveillance",
  repos = c("https://rtemis-org.r-universe.dev", "https://cloud.r-project.org")
)

Development version from GitHub

pak::pak("rtemis-org/infoveillance")