The RKI’s daily COVID19 cases are now available as a Frictionless Data Package on IPFS. The link to it is posted daily on our Twitter account.
The RKI commendably provides the entire German case data on COVID19 infections as Open Data (DL-DE->BY-2.0). The database is exported once a day and made available as CSV at the following link:
https://npgeo-corona-npgeo-de.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/dd4580c810204019a7b8eb3e0b329dd6_0
In the meantime, the data set has grown well over 100 MB in size and users often complain about problems downloading it. Furthermore, the description of the data can only be viewed directly on the website. So we decided, as a service for the community, to put this data into an easy to use Frictionless Data Package and publish it via IFPS. The IPFS-Hash for each package can be found on our Twitter account every day after publication:
https://twitter.com/MoringaSciPub
The data as it comes from the RKI is simple CSVs, and all information about the data is only viewable on the associated website. If only the data is shared, there is not much that can be done with it, because the associated information is missing. Frictionless Data solves this problem by packaging all the necessary meta-information with the data. We have copied all important information from the RKI website and packed it into the data package according to the standard.
IPFS is a distributed file system. Each file is segregated into smaller, linked blocks and offered in the network. If a user requests a file in IPFS, the system fetches all blocks of the file and stores them locally. The interesting thing about IPFS is that this user now offers this file in the network for a certain time, so there are already two copies. A third party requesting the file via IPFS now gets it transferred from two sources twice as fast. And already there are three copies. So the more users request and receive a file in IPFS, the faster new users then get that file transferred themselves. So IPFS is an ideal system for making that kind of public data available. That is why we at Moringa Science Publishing also use IPFS to make the articles and data we publish available in addition to the website: Moringa Publication Directory
This way, Moringa Science Publishing is providing a meaningful contribution to make German COVID19 data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR).
