The overall design objective for RODS is similar to that of an early warning system for missile defense; namely, to collect whatever data are required to achieve early detection from as wide an area as necessary and to analyze the data in a way that they can be used effectively by decision makers. It is required that this analysis be done in close to real time. This design objective is complex and difficult to operationalize because of the large number of organisms and the even larger number of possible routes of dissemination all requiring potentially different types of data for their detection, different algorithms, and different time urgencies. For this reason, our focus since beginning the project in 1999 has been on the specific problem of detecting a large-scale outbreak due to an outdoor (outside buildings) aerosol release of anthrax. Additional design objectives were adherence to NEDSS standards to ensure future interoperability with other types of public health surveillance systems, scalability, and that the system could not rely on manual data entry, except when it was done in a focused way in response to the system's own analysis of passively collected data.