The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore's Centre for Networked Intelligence, and the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) are collaborating with Semantic Web India,a Bengaluru-based independent technology business, to maintain a crucial COVID-19 Data Website.

Prof. V. Kamakoti, Associate Dean (Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research), IIT Madras, explaining the initiative, stated,”www.covid19india.org was providing a valuable service by making this data publicly available in one place, which is important to understand the pandemic. 

It benefitted the general public and researchers studying the COVID-19 spread. Factoring these aspects, the three Institutions are collaborating with Semantic Web India to provide similar data, with some added improvements.”

The website (www.incovid19.org) provided a thorough overview of the pandemic in India, including information on confirmed cases, active and recovered patients, testing, and fatalities. In addition, the site has just begun to provide vaccine administration progress for single-dose and fully vaccinated individuals.

The website, which was previously maintained entirely by volunteers using a crowd-sourcing strategy, gave essential information to both the general public and experts investigating the pandemic. However, organisers have now stated that they will close down after October 31, 2021.

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From November 1, 2021, this new project of these Academic Institutions and Semantic Web India will continue to update the data and make it available at incovid19.org.

The granularity of the data points on www.covid19india.org extends to most state districts. Historical data must be protected in order to enable future pandemic research.

Dr Asha Subramanian, Founder and CEO of Semantic Web India, said, "We are trying to make the process as automated as possible, to provide data continuity at the state/district level wherever possible, using published sources at state government portals, post 31st October 2021."

This new project will enable the automatic and comprehensive availability of data on COVID-19 related to confirmed cases, active, recovered, deceased, and tested for all 36 Indian states and union territories till March 2022. 

Furthermore, to ensure minimal disruption to applications and information consumers, the consolidated data will be made available to the general public via a public repository with appropriate APIs (application programming interface) matching those currently available at https://www.covid19india.org/.

This new portal will supplement the present Covid-19 India web page with historical and newly compiled data from various sources. Aside from that, the initiative intends to create a semantic foundation on the data to improve search and analysis.

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