Welcome to the revolution: COVID-19 and the democratization of spatial-temporal data

Abstract

On January 22, 2020, Johns Hopkins University launched its online COVID-19 dashboard to track in real time what began in December as the regional outbreak of a novel coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, China. The dashboard and its format were quickly adopted by other organizations, making global, national, and regional data on the pandemic available to all. The wealth of data freely offered in this way was collected by syndromic programs whose precise algorithms search official and popular sources for data on COVID-19 and other diseases. The dashboard signals a new phase in the maturation of the ''digital revolution'' from paper resources and, in their popular employ, a ''democratizion'' of data and their presentation. This perspective thus uses the COVID-19 experience as an example of the effect of this digital revolution on both expert and popular audiences. Understanding it permits a broader perspective on not simply the pandemic but also the cultural and socioeconomic context in which it has occurred.Mainstream: Data science output is well understood and (nearly) universally adopted ll

Disease mapping and innovation: A history from wood-block prints to Web 3.0

“…While this was certainly geographic, or more precisely spatial, it was not GIS in the sense of maps or graphics produced by cartographers or GIS experts but instead the output of computer-based systems of continuous data collection and presentation. 29 …”

Periodistas de datos. Análisis del perfil sociodemográfico del profesional en España y Latinoamérica

“…Por lo tanto, la expansión del periodismo de datos se explica más por un cambio en el contexto que por una voluntad de los profesionales de la información (Hammond, 2017). Esos dos aspectos diferenciadores y la relevancia del contexto concuerdan con el desarrollo de esta especialidad a raíz de la cobertura de la situación sanitaria derivada de la covid-19 (Desai, Nouvellet, Bhatia, Cori, & Lassmann, 2021;Mellado, Cárcamo-Ulloa, Alfaro, Inai, & Isbej, 2021), en la disposición de datos y la creciente demanda informativa (Koch, 2021) han puesto de manifiesto nuevos retos y oportunidades para el periodismo de datos.…”

AI and Data Democratisation for Intelligent Energy Management

“…In the domain of healthcare, data democracy means more than decision support [52,53]: shared, big data repositories are perceived to strengthen synergies among research teams, laboratories, and the broader science community, facilitating crossvalidation of scientific conclusions. In this case, however, data democracy should encompass responsible, legitimate, and secure sharing of personal, sensitive information of patients [54], as well as tracing medical conclusions to both data and expert opinion, to avoid rendering exaggeration or irresponsible advice authoritative (e.g., during the COVID-19 pandemic [55]).…”