JHU CORONA TRACKER SOFTWARE

JHU CORONA TRACKER SOFTWARE

“A lot of time and energy goes into finding the right data sources, assessing their validity, and creating ways to harmonize them with our system and present them to the public,” Choudhury says.ĪPL’s software platform processes the data in near real time, as soon as sources post it on their own websites. map, the system draws from state- and county-level reports, and sometimes local news outlets that supply machine-readable data.Ī number of team members from the different divisions vet those data sources before they’re integrated into the system. “We’ve built an automated infrastructure that goes out and pulls the coronavirus data from around the globe,” Katz says.ĪPL’s system now collects confirmed reports of coronavirus cases and deaths from nearly 200 data sources, including the World Health Organization and international and local health agencies. The APL team came on board to streamline the data-entry process. That quickly proved unsustainable as coronavirus cases spilled out of mainland China onto every continent. Dong constructed the dashboard using Esri’s ArcGIS mapping platform, at first entering data manually. The original global map- developed by Lauren Gardner and PhD student Ensheng “Frank” Dong of JHU’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering-went viral almost as soon as it launched on Jan. “If you want to produce something of this kind of high quality and integrity, it really does take a lot of people,” says Sayeed Choudhury, associate dean for research data management at the Sheridan Libraries, which supports software logistics for the dashboard. The project is supported by funding from the Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. map following the pandemic down to the county level, and an array of data visualizations from JHU’s Centers for Civic Impact, tracing trends like racial disparities and policy impacts from the virus.

The larger project also now includes a U.S. For the COVID-19 project, many of these experts have rearranged their work-if not entirely tilted their careers-around the shared behemoth, gathering coronavirus data from across the globe and presenting it to the public. The team from Sheridan Libraries supports data-intensive scholarship: collecting, sharing, visualizing, and preserving digital research and collections, spanning areas from humanities to engineering. Katz’s team at APL typically works with complex datasets for large government projects, in areas like global health security. “We’re all one big happy Blue Jay family, working together to answer a set of key questions, globally and domestically, around the progression of this virus,” says Aaron Katz, supervisor of the large-scale analytic systems group at the Applied Physics Laboratory. At a peak in March, the dashboard saw 4.56 billion feature requests.įor Johns Hopkins, the dashboard has been a groundbreaking endeavor, pooling the collaborative energy of specialists across the university-software developers, systems engineers, data scientists, mapping experts, digital curators-who may never have crossed paths otherwise but now coordinate shifts around the clock and keep in touch constantly through Zoom and Slack.

“They would tell us, ‘Oh, your COVID map is big, but not as big as our Pokémon Go map,’ which was their most in demand,” says Reina Murray, an application administrator at JHU’s Sheridan Libraries.īy March, the volume of web traffic to the Hopkins map effectively shut down that conversation-the Hopkins dashboard now holds the record as Esri’s highest-used service of all time, drawing hundreds of millions of feature requests every day. In the early days of managing the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard, experts at the university and those at Esri, the company providing the mapping software for the real-time pandemic tracker, had a friendly rivalry.

The following was originally published in The Hub.

Jhu corona tracker