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.