The R Consortium’s COVID-19 Working Group is providing a new home for the COVID-19 Data Hub Project. The goal of the COVID-19 Data Hub is to provide the worldwide research community with a unified dataset by collecting worldwide fine-grained case data, merged with external variables helpful for a better understanding of COVID-19.
An initial award of $5,000 will be used to pay storage and maintenance fees for the growing number of international COVID-19 case level data sets. Additionally, the R Consortium will be assuming responsibility for organizing R Community efforts to maintain and develop the site.
When asked about the importance of the project, R Consortium Director Joseph Rickert replied, “I am very pleased that the R Consortium is in a position to make a practical contribution to combating the pandemic. Although, we all hope that the new vaccines will bring the world to some semblance of normality next year, it is likely that the virus will be with us for some time and the need to collect and curate data will continue.”
Created last April by Emanuele Guidotti, doctoral assistant at the Institute for Financial Analysis at the University of Neuchatel, in collaboration with David Ardia, professor at HEC Montreal, the COVID-19 Data Hub Platform is a critical tool for accessing data related to the virus, and looks to establish cooperation and participation with the scientific community around the world. Professors Eric Suess and Ayona Chatterjee of the Department of Statistics and Biostatistics at the California State University East Bay will be joining this effort.
To date, the data has been downloaded 3 million times.
From the full article:
“Working for a research project on COVID-19, I realized the difficulty of accessing data related to the virus,” said Guidotti. The source is heterogeneous: depending on the country, information is disclosed in different languages and formats. To unify them, Guidotti developed the very first prototype of the COVID-19 Data Hub platform in the spring. “This work was originally part of a research paper that was subsequently published in Springer Natureand featured on the Joint Research Center website,” he said. Thanks to the collaboration of David Ardia, the platform received financial support from the Canadian Institute for the Valorization of Data IVADO and HEC Montréal.
To participate in the COVID19 Data Hub Platform: covid19datahub.io/
Original article (in French): https://quartierlibre.ca/regrouper-les-donnees-mondiales-sur-la-covid-19/