Publishing and Interlinking COVID-19 Data Using Linked Open Data Principles: Toward Effective Healthcare Planning and Decision-Making

The COVID-19 data is critical to support countries and healthcare organizations for effective planning and evidence-based practices to counter the pressures of cost reduction, improved coordination, and outcome and produce more with less. Several COVID-19 datasets are published on the web to support stakeholders in gaining valuable insights for better planning and decision-making in healthcare. However, the datasets are produced in heterogeneous proprietary formats, which create data silos and make data discovery and reuse difficult. Further, the data integration for analysis is difficult and is usually performed by the domain experts manually, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, an explicit, flexible, and widely acceptable methodology to represent, store, query, and visualize COVID-19 data is needed. In this paper, we have presented the design and development of the Linked Open COVID-19 Data system for structuring and transforming COVID-19 data into semantic format using explicitly developed ontology and publishing on the web using Linked Open Data (LOD) principles. The key motivation of this research is the evaluation of LOD technology as a potential option and application of the available Semantic Web tools (i.e., Protege, Excel2RDF, Fuseki, Silk, and Sgvizler) for building LOD-based COVID-19 information systems. We have also underpinned several use-case scenarios exploiting the LOD format of the COVID-19 data, which could be used by applications and services for providing relevant information to the end-users. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology and system is evaluated using the system usability scale and descriptive statistical methods and results are found promising.