IIT Madras, IISc, ISI to automate COVID-19 Data collection
Researchers from three institutions will automate the process of data collection from Central and State Government websites and collate them
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the Centre for Networked Intelligence at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) are collaborating with Semantic Web India to continue the efforts of a critical COVID-19 Data Website.
Covid19india.org offered a comprehensive view on the pandemic across India by providing data on confirmed cases, active and recovered cases, tests and fatalities. The portal also recently started showing vaccination administration status for single-dose and fully vaccinated.
The website, which till now was run by volunteers based on a crowd-sourcing model, provided valuable data to the public as well as researchers studying the pandemic. The organisers recently announced that they would stop their operations beyond October 31, 2021.
This new initiative of these Academic Institutions and Semantic Web India will now continue updating the data from 1st November 2021 and make it available at www.incovid19.org.
This new initiative would ensure the availability of data on COVID-19 pertaining to confirmed cases, active, recovered, deceased and tested for all the 36; states and Union Territories of India in an automated and robust manner until March 2022. Further, the consolidated data will be made available to the general audience through a public repository with appropriate APIs (application programming interface) matching those currently available at https://www.covid19india.org/ to ensure least disruption to applications and consumers of information.
The new portal www.incovid19.org will continue the efforts of the current Covid19 India portal with historical and newly collated data from diverse sources. Beyond this, the project also envisages creation of a semantic layer on the data to provide enhanced search and analysis.
Abhay an alumnus of IIMC and Delhi University, has over a decade long experience of reporting on various beats of journalism. During his free time he prefers listening to music or play indoor and outdoor games.