Re: nCoV

Those are some nice presentation of data.
But I have to say, they rather miss the points for me.

Simply giving re-presentations of what is now historical data is of pretty limited value.
The professionals will already have this data - in fact that is usually the source of the data - as well as their own views of it, which will embody lots of domain knowledge.
(Also, I don't see much Linked Data in them.)

A (the?) challenge is to be able to get earlier indication of what these numbers will be, by harvesting data from a wide variety of sources.
Another challenge is to help political and medical professionals manage problems and explore different scenarios.

That is why we explored visualisations (http://horizon.seme4.com/app/ ) of a range of different datasets that might help.

For example, before any of the reporting happens, you may find Twitter implying things (a spike in moaning of illness, but also even simply discussion of whistle-blower messages);
school absences may spike;
hospital admissions may increase;
purchase or prescription of certain sorts of drugs may change; etc.
And you will want to see this at a pretty fine level of geographic granularity, both for detection, and also for management.

And for management, getting swift understanding of travel patterns, staff absences in medical and other facilities etc. becomes crucial (can they cope?).
Knowing the trend in hospital occupancy rates enables you to build a new hospital in good time. :-)

Linked Data can help provide all this, with integration into proper dashboards for different sorts of professionals.

I know pretty pictures are nice, but if the underlying data isn't actually what people want and need, then they have little value.
That was behind our little demo - not the pictures themselves, but the ideas and possible sources.

By the way, as far as I can tell, I notice that none of the sites suggested provide the ability to normalise statistics against population (or area, for that matter); which seems a basic requirement of any system that purports to provide data based on geography. This is pretty easy using LInked Data, of course.

Finally, a a general principle for building Linked Data systems of this kind:
If you only look for the data from the sources that you know about, you won't find anything you didn't already pretty much know, such as all these sites, compared to the WHO site.

Best
Hugh

-- 
Hugh
023 8061 5652

Received on Tuesday, 11 February 2020 10:02:20 UTC