The Rapid Inquiry Facility (RIF) is a freely available software application that supports two types of environmental health activities: disease mapping studies and risk analysis studies.

It was designed to help epidemiologists and public health researchers to rapidly investigate potential environmental hazards, especially those related to industrial sites. The tool uses health, environmental, socio-economic, population and geographic data to calculate risks in relation to sources of exposure and to generate maps.

The RIF 4.0 is an open source, freely accessible web platform which can be used off and on-line. It uses a three layers framework in which all data can be stored locally or remotely on a spatially enabled database, PostGIS. This is directly linked to a Java middleware whose role is to check, validate and secure all communications between the graphical user interface, a JavaScript/HTML5 platform, and the database.

The RIF 4.0 integrates advanced methods in statistics, exposure assessment and data visualization. It is integrated with R and offers linkage to external software for the assessment of air pollution exposure and noise. Each block has been developed independently using a mixture of technologies which are connected together using an abstract interface (Middle layer).

Javascript GUI: