Creating a searchable database of resources for the biosecurity community.
Biosecurity Central
Web-based inventory design
March 2021 - March 2022
Client: The Government of Canada
My team at Talus Analytics, in collaboration with our partners at the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security and funding support from the government of Canadian, spent a year researching, interviewing, designing, and building a systematic, searchable database of resources related to biosecurity. Click below to view the site.
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The Problem
There is no systematically organized library of resources on biosecurity.
The ongoing pandemic has highlighted the need for nations to enhance their abilities to prevent, detect, and respond to all manner of biological threats, whether natural, accidental or deliberate. In this context, the biosecurity community also needs new ways to share and readily access the best available resources.
We built a site that serves as the hub for all frequently used materials relating to key areas of biosecurity. Our site allows you to search for specific resources, get a robust overview of the resource and how to access it (direct access provided where available) and also highlights connections between resources, allowing users to organically discover relevant information for their biosecurity work.
Our Solution
An online library of biosecurity resources
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Define data architecture, including ontology and taxonomy
Apply themes and priorities from expert interviews to the developing resource collection and tag resources using our selected metadata.
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Design interactive inventory site
Design a user interface that allows users to search for resources and discovery new resources.
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Build and test the site
Iteratively build and test the design and adapt as we gather insights from the research team.
Our process
Data and design
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Convene working group and collate resources
Work with experts in the biosecurity realm from all over the world to catalog useful resources and identify gaps.
Live site
In use in over 90 countries!
Biosecurity Central launched at the end of March 2022 and during the first launch weekend alone the site saw over 600 users from over 90 countries. The site will continue to be updated and resources will be added as they are identified. We anticipate this library being a go-to resources for biosecurity professionals for years to come.
Design spotlight
Enabling learning and discovery
Landing page
A bar graph on the landing page displays the number of resources by key topic, and allows users to read about each topic before they progress through the rest of the site.
Explore page
The Explore page is designed to teach users about the data architecture in addition to surfacing resources. Search results are displayed in four columns according to the main organizing structure of the site. Additional metadata are filterable, and for the most important metadata, users may expand the filter to read definitions of each tag.
