Coronatlas

"This is the time for facts, not fear. This is the time for science, not rumors. This is the time for solidarity, not stigma. We are all in this together."

-- The tweet from UNGeneva after a public health emergency of international concern over coronavirus.

Inspiration

Due to the outbreak of Novel coronavirus 2019, many people and organizations face the lack of resources. With social media being an important channel for these people to find help, we find many help requests on Weibo (like Chinese Twitter) but they only get attention from the public if they're lucky enough to be reposted by KOLs. We want to find a more efficient way to solve this problem and enable these requests more easily to be seen.

What it does

An online platform with map visualization that can

1. gather help requests from social media (such as Weibo, Twitter) automatically
2. People that need help can also register and submit their help request to the platform directly

In the McHacks, we primarily focus on the help requests from hospitals in China because they face the most severe lack of resources now.

How we built it

Data Science:

1. Scraping on Weibo with selected keywords and hashtags
2. Transform semi-structured texts to structured data using keywords detection (and entity analysis using IBM and Google API for those with little structure)

Backend:

1. Java Spring Boot framework using Java 8
2. Create RESTful APIs
3. Using Hibernate and JPA to generate PosgreSQL
4. Attempted deploying using Heroku

Frontend:

1. The modern front-end framework React along with ES6 Javascript.
2. Google-Map-React to generate the map with hospitals

3. Bought the domain coronatlas.space from domain.com

   Challenges we ran into

4. Many NLP APIs don't support Chineses or have worse performance in Chinese

5. Unfamiliar with web app development (but learned a lot!)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are glad we can use what we learn to help fighting against the plague (Two of us are from Hubei).

What we learned

How to build a map app with a team!

What's next for Coronatlas

Not only for Novel coronavirus! Not only for Chinese!

1. Add functionality for volunteers

2. Connect with Twitter

Built With

• java
• javascript
• python
• react