We have gathered interesting COVID-19 resources and made them easily accessible within a single gallery website.

The Data Science community is showing a great spirit of collaboration, extensively contributing to the understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic by finding new and creative ways to analyze, visualize and communicate data. Many such resources are popping up daily and we at Mirai Solutions have been inspired by many such works for our Covid19 Shiny app.

While working on updates and new releases of the app, we also realized the value of being able to gather and browse in one place the interesting resources we were coming across on social media, newspapers, GitHub etc. As data sets are constantly being updated, this also addresses the need to compare different data sources in a easy and quick way.

Such a need is now fulfilled by the COVID-19 Resource Gallery: an open source R Markdown website including a gallery of (embedded) pages created in a dynamic way based on simple metadata in JSON format.

The gallery website is built using a dedicated R Markdown site generator provided by the novel rmdgallery package hosted on GitHub:

remotes::install_github("riccardoporreca/rmdgallery")

The entries of our gallery are listed as metadata in JSON format like the following for our Covid19 app

{
  "mirai-covid-19": {
    "title":  "Covid19 Shiny App",
    "author": "Mirai Solutions GmbH",
    "url": "https://github.com/miraisolutions/Covid19#readme",
    "menu_entry": "Mirai Covid19",
    "template": "embed-url",
    "content": "https://miraisolutions.shinyapps.io/covid19"
  }
}

The rmdgallery::gallery_site generator allows to include the specified content (along with the other metadata) in the resulting gallery page using alternative templates. In the case above we are simply embedding the Covid19 Shiny app given its URL (see the template field), which is the typical case for including pages like dashboards and web apps.

The website is automatically built and deployed via GitHub Actions, and new gallery pages are simply added by pushing updated JSON metadata to the master branch.

The gallery currently features:

• Covid19 Shiny App by Mirai Solutions GmbH. Please note that the current version is using a temporary data source due to an on-going data structure change in the data source.
• COVID-19 Global Dashboard by Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the original data source for Covid19.
• COVID-19 Italy Dashboard by Dipartimento della Protezione Civile.
• COVID-19 Switzerland Dashboard by Daniel Probst, which is based on official Cantonal data.
• COVID-19 Worldometers Data by worldometers.info, on which new data used for Covid19 are based.

Do you like the idea and want to include your favorite COVID-19 resources in your own gallery? Feel free to fork our GitHub repository and see it live at username.github.io/covid-19-gallery!