COVID data app for business launches

Developers say it’s not a replacement for COVIDSafe but will help businesses make decisions about when and how to re-open.

The Australian government coronavirus (COVID-19) tracking app 'COVIDSafe' is installed on April 27, 2020 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo Illustration by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

A new coronavirus data platform is giving businesses the tools to track the spread of COVID-19, but the companies behind the application – Salesforce, MuleSoft and Tableau – say it isn't designed to replace the Australian government's efforts.

The platform, launched on Wednesday, is an open data service for developers taking in data across public sources, including The New York Times, EUCDC and the COVID Tracking Project, and curating them into standardised data models that can be used to make decisions, as businesses begin to ponder reopening.

MuleSoft chief technology officer Uri Sarid told The Australian the platform wasn’t a replacement for the government's COVIDSafe App but was instead a resource for executives and developers to use to develop their own tools that complement and address some inefficiencies in existing contact tracing solutions.

Mr Sarid said that more than any other crisis, the current COVID-19 pandemic was all about information.

"If we could figure out where the virus is, it would be easier to control. If we could figure out where it isn’t, that’s where businesses could start to return to normal," he said.

"And it isn’t easy to do. The virus is invisible for some time before it reveals itself in symptoms, by which time it could have spread widely. All too often, it doesn’t reveal itself symptomatically at all."

According to Mr Sarid, while organisations like ESRI and the Pacific Disaster Center had provided data to crisis management experts and in specific applications already, this was a unique scenario where everyone needs access to this data, from individuals to organisations of all industries and sizes.

"But which data sources are reliable? Are they comparable, so they can be combined? And, critically, how can the data be made easy to consume by computers that can turn it into visualisations to drive insights, power mobile applications to reach hundreds of millions of people, and automate decision support systems?," he said.

"Does every group of developers building mobile apps need to search GitHub for raw data, scrape web pages of their published figures, become expert enough to tell good data from bad, and build the same infrastructure for data ingestion, normalisation, aggregation, and reliable consumption?

"This is why we’ve built the COVID-19 Data Platform, a free service to gather, unify, and deliver trusted COVID-19 data to developers and analysts around the world, as well as the Salesforce ecosystem.”

Salesforce senior vice president for product management Liam Doyle said the COVID-19 Data Platform was built using a combination of Salesforce, MuleSoft and Tableau teams and resources.

"It's a completely free data pipeline for critical sources that will support business decision-makers and developers as they create their own mission-critical applications and analytics to help inform their risk-management strategy around COVID-19 and their plans to return to the office," he said.

"We see great potential for the data platform and we intend to broaden the scope of the data sources for the foreseeable future so that we can provide the breadth of trusted information that our ecosystem needs to build their solutions."

According to Mr Doyle, the team has initially integrated publicly available data sources from the New York Times, EUCDC and the COVID Tracking Project, and have another set of data sources coming in the next two weeks.

"Of these data sources EU CDC does cover the APAC region, but not to the level of granularity that Australian decision makers would require," he said.

"That said, we plan to provide more global data sets and are adding these new sources quickly. Equally, the current data sources remain helpful for an Australian company when making decisions about offices and employees in North America.”