The role of Open Data in Humanitarian Aid

The openness and re-use of open data is usually linked to the development of new business, improved governance and accountability, the advances in new technologies and socio-economic growth. However, other opportunity provided by open data is a faster and more effective response to international health emergencies.

In an increasingly connected world, sharing and combining new methods for collecting data can help transform how we react, for example, to humanitarian emergencies. In this context, a panel on open data and humanitarian aid was held during the last International Open Data Conference in which the international HDX initiative (Humanitarian Data Exchange) was shown, an open platform of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) designed to share information on humanitarian crises.

Responsible for ensuring a coherent response to the world's health emergencies, since its launch in 2014 this UN agency has been in charge of managing the portal that currently has more than 4,200 datasets from 834 sources from 200 countries. In addition to this open datasets, HDX provides visualizations, graphs and reports on humanitarian crises such as the Ebola epidemiological outbreak.

After all, the power of information would allow us to combat epidemics, as long as data is opened and reused as quickly as possible, something essential in this type of critical situation. Unfortunately, nowadays there are no standards or guidelines to guarantee this procedure. Thus, researchers, scientists and health professionals need common practices that encourage and reward collaboration.

When dealing with a health emergency -as in the cases of the Zika, Ebola or Dengue outbreaks- groups of professionals from different places and with different standards are mobilized, who must overcome the barriers of not knowing who owns the data. Thus, the lack of a single publication standard results in the difficulty of integrating the data into several dimensions. However, if international protocols are adopted, the community of researchers will have the opportunity to share critical information immediately whenever a health emergency of this nature arises, no matter where or when.

In order to find a possible solution to the poor data exchange, in September 2015 the World Health Organization consulted leaders from different sectors who confirmed that the openness of information during health emergencies should become a norm on a global scale. To date, more than 30 organizations have ratified this consensus reached by WHO to share such data.

Among the efforts to combat epidemiological outbreaks through information and knowledge, in addition to the UN initiative, the open data platform developed by UNICEF in collaboration with Google is included. This project aims to process different information sources to visualize and predict possible epidemics, enabling governments and organizations worldwide to make better informed decisions to combat future health emergencies. After all,  the re-use of more accurate and detailed data helps create detection systems based on historical and real-time data.

In parallel, another good example would be the free access database, GenBank, which contains genetic sequences from different organizations around the world. The availability of interoperable data that encompasses all factors related to a health emergency, including the virus genome, can positively impact the study and research on any disease.

Publication of health emergency data in open format enables collaboration, research and innovation based on official sources of information. In this way, it would be possible to cross-match the results and data in real time to analyze conditions, launch early responses, train teams and prevent epidemics with the single, common purpose of saving lives in the affected areas.