A New Ebola Crisis Page Built with Open Data


HDX team: “We are introducing a new Ebola crisis page that provides an overview of the data available in HDX. The page includes an interactive map of the worst-affected countries, the top-line figures for the crisis, a graph of cumulative Ebola cases and deaths, and over 40 datasets.
We have been working closely with UNMEER and WHO to make Ebola data available for public use. We have also received important contributions from the British Red Cross, InterAction, MapAction, the Standby Task Force, the US Department of Defense, and WFP, among others.

How we built it

The process to create this page started a couple of months ago by simply linking to existing data sites, such as Open Street Map’s geospatial data or OCHA’s common operational datasets. We then created a service by extracting the data on Ebola cases and deaths from the bi-weekly WHO situation report and making the raw files available for analysts and developers.
The OCHA Regional Office in Dakar contributed a dataset that included Ebola cases by district, which they had been collecting from reports by the national Ministries of Health since March 2014. This data was picked up by The New York Times graphics team and by Gapminder which partnered with Google Crisis Response to add the data to the Google Public Data Explorer.

As more organizations shared Ebola datasets through HDX, users started to transform the data into useful graphs and maps. These visuals were then shared back with the wider community through the HDX gallery. We have incorporated many of these user-generated visual elements into the design of our new Ebola crisis page….”
See also Hacking Ebola.