The new website, www.incovid19.org, will collate COVID-19 data across India
The website www.covid19india.org — which had been offering a comprehensive view on the pandemic across India by providing data on the confirmed, active and recovered cases, tests as well as fatalities — shut operations on October 31, 2021.
Now a new website, www.incovid19.org, will continue collating COVID-19 data across India. It has been launched by the 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 firm based in Bengaluru.
www.covid19india.org 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.
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.
Siva Athreya of ISI, Bengaluru, noted that www.covid19india.org has been available since the pandemic started and has tracked the pandemic across geographies in India.
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.
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.
Asha Subramanian, founder and chief executive, 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 after October 31, 2021.
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