Obnet: Network of semantic associations for obesity

Background Obesity is a complex disease that causes health complications and mortality. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) classified obesity as a disease and introduced guidelines for diagnosis. To understand complex relationships among all contributing factors, we have developed the ObNet (Network of Semantic Association for Obesity). The concepts were adopted from ARIANA [1,2]. The Local Latent Semantic Analysis tool [3], developed in the CVPIA lab, was used to extract network of semantic associations. Web services and visualization were developed to display the associations in a flexible network form that is easy to interact.