COVID-19 Data Hub Wins the 2024 Open Data Quality Award

A global COVID-19 data platform, born in Quebec, receives national recognition

The COVID-19 Data Hub has just won the prestigious “2024 Open Data Quality Award” presented by the Canadian Open Data Community.

Initiated in 2020 by Emanuele Guidotti, then a doctoral student at the University of Neuchâtel, and IVADO Professor David Ardia of HEC Montréal, this project aimed to interconnect multiple COVID-19 data sources into a unified platform.

“With the proliferation of databases, there was a need for a platform that integrated these various sources to enable comprehensive analysis,” explains David Ardia, an IVADO researcher. “Our goal was to create a tool that could establish relationships between medical information and sociopolitical factors.”

An International Impact

Initially supported by IVADO funding, the project later received backing from the R Consortium (2021-2024) and the University of Lugano (USI) in Switzerland, where Emanuele Guidotti continues his research today.

The platform provides researchers with a unified dataset that includes detailed epidemiological variables, policy measures compiled by Oxford, and various spatial databases.

A Tool for Reproducible Research

The strength of the project lies in its transparency. The entire source code is available on GitHub, and the platform offers dedicated packages for R and Python.

“We have also implemented a daily data archiving system to facilitate research reproducibility,” notes Emanuele Guidotti, whom collaborators consider “the father of the project.”

The COVID-19 Data Hub has been featured in the Journal of Open Source Software (2020) and Nature’s Scientific Data (2022).

A Well-Deserved Recognition

This award highlights the importance of open and quality data in scientific research, particularly during a global health crisis.

To access the platform: covid19datahub.io