Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-Madras), the Centre for Networked Intelligence at the
Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), and Semantic Web India, a private technology firm based in Bengaluru, have joined hands to help continue the efforts of a critical COVID-19 Data Website, which was operated by a group of volunteers and has now shut down.
The website, www.covid19india.org had been offering 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.
It was run by volunteers based on a crowd-sourcing model and has been an important source of valuable data to the public as well as researchers studying the pandemic. The organisers recently announced that they would stop their operations beyond 31st October 2021.
The new coalition of academic Institutions and Semantic Web India will continue updating the data from today and make it available at a new website, www.incovid19.org.
Prof. V. Kamakoti, Associate Dean (Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research), IIT Madras, said, the new coalition will provide data similar to what was provided by www.covid19india.org, with some added improvements. It will collate all the data on COVID-19 being put out in the public domain by various Government entities and provide a one-stop-shop in a standardised format. “The granularity of the data points of www.covid19india.org extended to the districts of most states. The historical data must be preserved in order to support future studies on the pandemic”, he added.
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Prof. Siva Athreya of Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Bengaluru, noted that www.covid19india.org has been available since the pandemic started and has tracked the pandemic across geographies in India and said that it has been a valuable contribution.
This new initiative would ensure the availability of data on testing, confirmed , recovered, deceased, and active cases of COVID-19 from across 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 the public repository with appropriate APIs (application programming interface) matching those currently available at https://www.covid19india.org/ to ensure the least disruption to applications and consumers of information.
Dr. Asha Subramanian, Founder, and CEO, Semantic Web India, said, the coalition would take all efforts to make the process as automated as possible, to provide data continuity at the state/district level wherever possible, using published sources at state government portals, post 31 October 2021.
