A citizen science initiative for open data and visualization of COVID-19 outbreak in Kerala, India

Objective: India reported its first coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) case in the state of Kerala and an outbreak initiated subsequently. The Department of Health Services, Government of Kerala, initially released daily updates through daily textual bulletins for public awareness to control the spread of the disease. However, these unstructured data limit upstream applications, such as visualization, and analysis, thus demanding refinement to generate open and reusable datasets.

Materials and methods: Through a citizen science initiative, we leveraged publicly available and crowd-verified data on COVID-19 outbreak in Kerala from the government bulletins and media outlets to generate reusable datasets. This was further visualized as a dashboard through a front-end Web application and a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) repository, which serves as an application programming interface for the front end.

Results: From the sourced data, we provided real-time analysis, and daily updates of COVID-19 cases in Kerala, through a user-friendly bilingual dashboard (https://covid19kerala.info/) for nonspecialists. To ensure longevity and reusability, the dataset was deposited in an open-access public repository for future analysis. Finally, we provide outbreak trends and demographic characteristics of the individuals affected with COVID-19 in Kerala during the first 138 days of the outbreak.

Discussion: We anticipate that our dataset can form the basis for future studies, supplemented with clinical and epidemiological data from the individuals affected with COVID-19 in Kerala.

Conclusions: We reported a citizen science initiative on the COVID-19 outbreak in Kerala to collect and deposit data in a structured format, which was utilized for visualizing the outbreak trend and describing demographic characteristics of affected individuals.