• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 27, 2020

Verizon Media launched three resources on Monday to help developers and data teams better understand publicly available COVID-19 data.  

The dataset, API, and dashboard aim to help engineers analyze and navigate COVID-19 data. All are powered by the Yahoo Knowledge Graph, a large collection of information that includes billions of facts about places, organizations, creative works, and more.

Guru Gowrappan, CEO of Verizon Media, explains how the company felt compelled to find ways to inform the public and help to organize the high volume of information, data and figures released daily.

While Google and Microsoft use the SpecialAnnouncement schema markup to serve up the information in search results, Verizon Media uses the Yahoo Knowledge COVID-19 dataset, available to the public under a Creative Commons license.

The data provides information on locations, cases, deaths and recoveries, broken down by country, state, and county level.

Similarly, the Knowledge Graph relies on data sourced from hundreds of publicly available government websites, as well as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

Verizon Media pulled raw data from these resources and integrated it into one feed to help track the spread and containment of the virus.

This dataset also powers the COVID-19 tracking updates on Yahoo Search, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Weather.

A publicly available API also launched to help developers explore the dataset and build their own coronavirus charts, simulations, and applications.

Verizon Media has also released a dashboard featuring COVID-19 data in an interactive map to help people 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.

Earlier this month, the company launched a search engine to help medical professionals and researchers find COVID-19 data without having to build their own search back-end technology. Developers built the open-source search engine using Vespa, Verizon Media’s technology.

The company says it uses Vespa for applications such as recommendation, personalization and ad targeting, as well as to stream personalized articles on Yahoo.com.