Verizon Media provides developers with tools on COVID-19 data

Verizon Media has launched three new resources that developers and data teams can use to organize and better understand publicly available COVID-19 data.

The resources include a dataset, API, and dashboard that help engineers analyze and navigate COVID-19 data. The data and resources are powered by the Yahoo Knowledge Graph, which is one of the largest organized collections of information and includes billions of facts about places, organizations, creative works, and more.

“The COVID-19 pandemic challenges us all to ask how we can help fight this virus and unite as a community,” said Guru Gowrappan, CEO of Verizon Media. “As a media organization focused on delivering trusted content to the world, we are compelled to find ways to inform the public and to empower knowledge. Given the high volume of information, data, and figures released daily, one way we can help is to play a role in organizing the content that exists, while also sharing our technology that allows us to create informative and interactive visualizations of the data available about this virus.”

Available to the public under an Creative Commons license, the Yahoo Knowledge COVID-19 dataset provides worldwide locations, cases, deaths, and recoveries, broken down by country, state, and county level.

The information is sourced entirely from hundreds of publicly available government websites, as well as organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

For the dataset, Verizon Media used extraction technologies to acquire raw data from these sources, and then unified the data into a single feed to help track the virus’s spread and containment. This dataset will also power coronavirus tracking updates on Yahoo Search, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Weather.

Verizon Media also launched a publicly available API that developers can use to explore the dataset and build their own coronavirus charts, simulations, and applications. For example, medical researchers could build a timeline graphic to illustrate confirmed cases or the flattening of the curve in a specific county, or to measure the effect of social distancing over time.

Additionally, Verizon Media released a dashboard featuring COVID-19 data in an interactive map that can be used to learn about the spread of the virus. This dashboard allows developers to easily demonstrate how the data can be visualized, showing data by country, state, and county.