title: Development and application of a Chinese webpage suicide information mining system (sims).
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  This study aims at designing and piloting a convenient Chinese webpage suicide information mining system (SIMS) to help search and filter required data from the internet and discover potential features and trends of suicide.
  
  
  METHODS
  SIMS utilizes Microsoft Visual Studio2008, SQL2008 and C# as development tools. It collects webpage data via popular search engines; cleans the data using trained models plus minimum manual help; translates the cleaned texts into quantitative data through models and supervised fuzzy recognition; analyzes and visualizes related variables by self-programmed algorithms.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The SIMS developed comprises such functions as suicide news and blogs collection, data filtering, cleaning, extraction and translation, data analysis and presentation. SIMS-mediated mining of one-year webpage revealed that: peak months and hours of web-reported suicide events were June-July and 10-11 am respectively, and the lowest months and hours, September-October and 1-7 am; suicide reports came mostly from Soho, Tecent, Sina etc.; male suicide victims over counted female victims in most sub-regions but southwest China; homes, public places and rented houses were the top three places to commit suicide; poisoning, cutting vein and jumping from building were the most commonly used methods to commit suicide; love disputes, family disputes and mental diseases were the leading causes.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  SIMS provides a preliminary and supplementary means for monitoring and understanding suicide. It proposes useful aspects as well as tools for analyzing the features and trends of suicide using data derived from Chinese webpages. Yet given the intrinsic "dual nature" of internet-based suicide information and the tremendous difficulties experienced by ourselves and other researchers, there is still a long way to go for us to expand, refine and evaluate the system.
authors.affiliation: School of Health Service Management, Anhui Medical University, 81, Meishan Road, Hefei, Anhui, China.
authors.forename: Penglai
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chai
authors.forename: Lu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Debin
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D017677:Age Distribution; D000465:Algorithms; D002681:China / Q000453:epidemiology; D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008297:Male; D057386:Search Engine / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D017678:Sex Distribution; D013405:Suicide / Q000639:trends*