Where There’s a Link, There’s a Way

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there has been a proliferation of websites and portals developed to share resources about the topic. Your challenge is to find innovative ways to present and analyze integrated, real-time information about the environmental factors affecting the spread of COVID-19.

Coronaview

Summary

A per-country overview of the current state of government advice, relevant local news, and how cases are trending.

How We Addressed This Challenge

During this crisis we've seen how simple, unambiguous messages, are the only thing that can be communicated to everyone. We took stats from official data sources, plus advice that can often be conflicting and confusing, and distilled them into an easy to understand overview.

How We Developed This Project

The site is a Python/Django web application backed by several data sources.

  • The news feeds are taken from RSS, JSON Linked Data, and Google News, and have a system for updating regularly.
  • The trending COVID status uses data from a public dataset hosted in Google BigQuery, with a process to update to new data regularly.
  • The official advice is taken from government websites, curated, and entered into a custom Content Management System.

We used Python, Django, Postgres, BigQuery, Heroku, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap.

During the project we shared knowledge about Django, Google BigQuery/Google Cloud, and data processing, learning from each others' strengths.

Project Demo

The site is online and working. The global view is available here: https://coronaview-hack.herokuapp.com/ however the country-specific views are a better illustration of what we've achieved so do click through the countries we have added to the system so far. Adding support for more countries can be done in the CMS that operates the site.

Tags
#visualisation #news #python #app
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.