Building an Open Resources Repository for COVID-19 Research

Tao Hu; Weihe Wendy Guan; Xinyan Zhu; Yuanzheng Shao; Lingbo Liu; Jing Du; Hongqiang Liu; Huan Zhou; Jialei Wang; Bing She; Luyao Zhang; Zhibin Li; Peixiao Wang; Yicheng Tang; Ruizhi Hou; Yun Li; Dexuan Sha; Yifan Yang; Ben Lewis; Devika Kakkar; Shuming Bao

doi:10.2478/dim-2020-0012

Building an Open Resources Repository for COVID-19 Research

Data Inf Manag. 2020 Sep 1;4(3):130-147. doi: 10.2478/dim-2020-0012. Epub 2022 Mar 31.

Authors

Tao Hu¹, Weihe Wendy Guan¹, Xinyan Zhu^{2

3}, Yuanzheng Shao^{2

3}, Lingbo Liu⁴, Jing Du², Hongqiang Liu⁵, Huan Zhou⁶, Jialei Wang⁶, Bing She⁷, Luyao Zhang⁸, Zhibin Li⁹, Peixiao Wang^{9

10}, Yicheng Tang¹¹, Ruizhi Hou¹², Yun Li¹³, Dexuan Sha¹³, Yifan Yang¹⁴, Ben Lewis¹, Devika Kakkar¹, Shuming Bao¹⁵

Affiliations

¹ Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
² State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China.
³ Collaborative Innovation Center of Geospatial Technology, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China.
⁴ School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China.
⁵ College of Geomatics, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, Shandong, China.
⁶ School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China.
⁷ Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
⁸ Social Science Division, Duke Kunshan University, Suzhou, China.
⁹ School of Government, Peking University, Beijing, China.
¹⁰ The Academy of Digital China, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, Fujian, China.
¹¹ School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, Anhui, China.
¹² School of Mathematical Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
¹³ Department of Geography and GeoInformation Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA.
¹⁴ Department of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA.
¹⁵ China Data Institute, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak is a global pandemic declared by the World Health Organization, with rapidly increasing cases in most countries. A wide range of research is urgently needed for understanding the COVID-19 pandemic, such as transmissibility, geographic spreading, risk factors for infections, and economic impacts. Reliable data archive and sharing are essential to jump-start innovative research to combat COVID-19. This research is a collaborative and innovative effort in building such an archive, including the collection of various data resources relevant to COVID-19 research, such as daily cases, social media, population mobility, health facilities, climate, socioeconomic data, research articles, policy and regulation, and global news. Due to the heterogeneity between data sources, our effort also includes processing and integrating different datasets based on GIS (Geographic Information System) base maps to make them relatable and comparable. To keep the data files permanent, we published all open data to the Harvard Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/2019ncov), an online data management and sharing platform with a permanent Digital Object Identifier number for each dataset. Finally, preliminary studies are conducted based on the shared COVID-19 datasets and revealed different spatial transmission patterns among mainland China, Italy, and the United States.

Keywords: COVID-19; GIS; data repository; open data; spatial data.