Tool assembly: COVID-19 Data Portal

What is the European COVID-19 Data Portal?

The European COVID-19 Data Portal is part of the European COVID-19 Data Platform, which was launched to facilitate the urgent need to share and analyse COVID-19 data and thus accelerate research that will provide responses and build solutions, such as vaccines, treatments and public health interventions. The Platform comprises three core components, the SARS-CoV-2 Data Hubs, the Federated European Genome-phenome Archive and the COVID-19 Data Portal. The COVID-19 Data Portal brings together and continuously updates relevant COVID-19 datasets from a breadth of analytical platforms. Data are submitted using the SARS-CoV-2 Data Hubs functions or via other major centres of biomedical data. The data available from the COVID-19 Data Portal cover raw and assembled viral and human sequences, protein structures, proteomics, gene and protein expression data, compound screening, metabolomics and imaging data (from ELIXIR Core Data Resources and other databases); COVID-19-relevant literature publications and pre-prints are also integrated. The aim is to have a wide variety of open data from across the globe systematised and easily accessible to researchers following FAIR principles. The European COVID-19 Data Platform enables national data producers to share biomolecular data with the international scientific community, making these data available for reuse. Ultimately it aims to allow for rapid analysis and dissemination to inform research, public health and health communities and in an evidenced-based manner.

How the portal is useful for researchers and how it is supposed to fit into their processes?

Researchers benefit the COVID-19 Data Portal in a host of ways, including:

discoverability of COVID-19-relevant biomolecular data and related literature;
support for the sharing, analysis and publication of newly-generated data;
access to integrated COVID-19 data across multiple assay platforms;
flexible access to data via web, API and FTP interfaces;
access to data exploration and analysis tools.

What are the components for the COVID-19 Data Portal?

The COVID-19 Data Portal contains reusable components that will be of value to data stewards, including:

discovery API with documented COVID-19 index points across data and literature resources covered by the COVID-19 Data Portal;
options for membership of the network of national COVID-19 Data Portals, currently comprising some 8 partners;
open source web application to establish a national COVID-19 Data Portal, courtesy of ELIXIR Sweden.

For all these components, support is given via ecovid19@ebi.ac.uk.

What country specific instances are there and how new instances are deployed?

The European COVID-19 Data Portal includes a federation of national data portals, hosted in those nations. As of 2023, this includes Estonia, Greece, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Turkey.The national COVID-19 Data Portals provide information, guidelines, tools and services to support each nation’s researchers in creating and sharing research data on COVID-19. The purpose of the national Portals is to provide an entry and orientation point into national activities including support, data management tools, projects and funding. For centralised data, such as viral sequences, national Portals are closely linked into the central COVID-19 Data Portal to allow users smooth access across the full selection of functions available to them.