Temporal Features in Biological Warfare

No matter how prepared a population may be, bioterrorism cannot be prevented: the first clues will always be given by ill people. Temporal analysis applied to this type of scenarios could be an additional tool for limiting disruption among civilians allowing for recognizing typical temporal progression and duration of symptoms in first infected people. We propose the application of a fuzzy temporal reasoning system we have developed for biomedical temporal data analysis in different scenarios after a hypothetical attack. The system is able to handle both qualitative and metric temporal knowledge affected by vagueness and uncertainty, taking into account in this way the vagueness of patients reports expressed in natural language.