IIT Madras, IISc collaborate with Semantic Web India to continue COVID-19 data collection

NEW DELHI: 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, a private technology firm based in Bengaluru, to continue the efforts of a critical COVID-19 data website. The new public repository is being hosted at website, incovid19.org, the official notice read.

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The website, covid19india.org, which was till now 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.

However, the website was run by volunteers based on a crowd-sourcing model, providing 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 IIT Madras, IISc Bengaluru and Semantic Web India will now continue updating the data from today, November 1, 2021, and make it available at 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.

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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 covid19india.org/ to ensure least disruption to applications and consumers of information.

Elaborating on the key objectives of this initiative, Dr Asha Subramanian, founder and CEO, Semantic Web India, said, “We are trying 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 31st October 2021.”