How the Data Marketplace is helping the world leverage pandemic data

Leading Data Services

Together with Snowflake, Starschema, a leading data services and technology company, has been packaging and sharing data related to the pandemic to help inform better global decision-making. They have achieved this by creating a robust COVID-19 epidemiological data set and making it available, free of charge, to thousands of companies via the Data Marketplace.

This data set has since served as a single source of truth for COVID-19 incidence and mortality data throughout the pandemic, helping organisations to build contingency plans and make more-informed decisions in response to the global health crisis. To date, hundreds of businesses and public sector bodies have leveraged the available data in order to forecast and plan response scenarios for both their workforce and customers.

“It’s impressive what data allows us to do in a crisis, and especially for the COVID-19 crisis. We’re running what is probably the largest vaccination campaign in the world, and the data allows us to see, in near-real time and at a granular level, which areas are most affected, which areas are short on vaccine, which areas need to be resupplied and which areas need specific help,” says Chris von Csefalvay, VP of Special Projects, Starschema. “Our goal is to easily share data of the highest quality and granularity possible. Snowflake helps us achieve this goal with the power of its Data Marketplace and technology.”

Vaccination Data Sets

These vaccination datasets have been provided in addition to the previous COVID-19 data already shared in 2020 by the company, also at no cost through the Data Marketplace, to allow public and private authorities to follow the evolution of the pandemic.

Powered by Snowflake’s platform, the Data Marketplace allows public and private authorities to securely access live, governed, shared data sets and to receive automatic updates to that data in real time. It’s the backbone that’s enabled this partnership  to deliver COVID-19 and vaccination data easily and efficiently. Organisations can connect to the  Data Marketplace from their Snowflake account for seamless integration of the immunisation dataset and initiate rapid-query processing.

In building these datasets, the data is  aggregated, normalised, and integrated from many sources – including Our World in Data, JHU, hospitals, pharmacists, states and the WHO – via the Data Cloud  and then is shared via the Data Marketplace.

Starchema’s datasets are easily accessible from Snowflake Data Marketplace and SQL queries detailed in a dedicated blog post. It is also possible to build your own interfaces based on a combination of Snowflake, Tableau, Grafana and Kubernetes as detailed in this article. Summing up the initiative, Von Csefalvay states: “Good things happen when people share data, and few things confirm this more than this project.”

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