HEDS Website of the month for April - COVID19 Data Portal

This month's website of the month will hopefully prove incredibly useful for those involved in the work going on to fight COVID19 

https://www.covid19dataportal.org/

The COVID19 Data Portal says: The COVID-19 Data Portal was launched in April 2020 to bring together relevant datasets for sharing and analysis in an effort to accelerate coronavirus research. It enables researchers to upload, access and analyse COVID-19 related reference data and specialist datasets as part of the wider European COVID-19 Data Platform.

https://www.covid19dataportal.org/

More information taken from the COVID19 Data Portal

The aim of the COVID-19 Data Portal is to facilitate data sharing and analysis, and to accelerate coronavirus research

An unprecedented number of scientific efforts are taking place worldwide in order to help combat the new coronavirus epidemic (COVID-19). One of the biggest challenges in this fast-moving situation is to share data and findings in a coordinated way, in order to understand the disease and to develop treatments and vaccines.

To address this challenge, EMBL-EBI and partners have has set up the COVID-19 Data Portal, which will bring together relevant datasets submitted to EMBL-EBI and other major centres for biomedical data. The aim is to facilitate data sharing and analysis, and to accelerate coronavirus research.

The COVID-19 Data Portal will enable researchers to upload, access and analyse COVID-19 related reference data and specialist datasets.

The COVID-19 Data Portal will be the primary entry point into the functions of a wider project, the European COVID-19 Data Platform.

Rapid and open sharing of data greatly accelerates research and discovery, which is essential to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The European Commission and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), together with EU Member States and research partners such as ELIXIR, are deploying a dedicated European COVID-19 Data Platform that will enable the rapid collection and comprehensive data sharing of available research data from different sources for the European and global research communities. This joint effort is a priority pilot to realise the objectives of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

The European COVID-19 Data Platform will consist of two connected components:

• SARS-CoV-2 Data Hubs, which will organise the flow of SARS-CoV-2 outbreak sequence data and provide comprehensive open data sharing for the European and global research communities.
  Read more about the Data Hubs >
• COVID-19 Data Portal, which will bring together and continuously update relevant COVID-19 datasets and tools, will host sequence data sharing and will facilitate access to other SARS-CoV-2 resources.

NICE to use wider range of data

Image CC BY 2.0 Janet McKnight
http://bit.ly/31xapc2

From the NICE website:

“NICE already makes use of a wide range of published scientific evidence when developing its guidance for the NHS on health technologies and what constitutes best practice for diagnosing and managing a range of conditions.

We now plan to update our processes and methods for the identification, assessment and interpretation of data. We will also set out the full range of data sources that we will accept and the methods and analytical tools that we will put in place to assess the quality and suitability of data in future.







Data sources could include:

• electronic health record data
• ‘real-world data’ looking at health and social care practice outside of trials, such as registries and clinical audits
• any other relevant data that has been made available for others to use, such as data held by local authorities about public health and social care.

By using a broader range of data, we believe there will be further opportunities to improve our guidance, enable existing recommendations to be updated faster, and  gain a better understanding of the impact our guidance has for people accessing health and social care services.

Details of the next steps for how we will develop information around our methods and process in this area, and our plans for implementation, will be presented at our public board meeting in March, with accompanying papers available on the website.”

Website of the Month for October - RAW Graphs

This month's website is a really useful one for those wanting to turn their dull, grey spreadsheets into engaging data visualisations. RAW Graphs is an open source data visualisation tool that creates a visual representation of complex data so that it is easy for everyone to digest.

https://rawgraphs.io/

RAW Graphs say: "Primarily conceived as a tool for designers and vis geeks, RAW Graphs aims at providing a missing link between spreadsheet applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, OpenRefine) and vector graphics editors (e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, Sketch)."

"The project, led and maintained by the DensityDesign Research Lab (Politecnico di Milano) was released publicly in 2013 and is regarded by many as one of the most important tools in the field of data visualisation."