CIC-E: COVID Information Commons Extension for Pandemic Recovery

The COVID Information Commons, CIC (http://covidinfocommons.datascience.columbia.edu/), was established in May 2020 via an NSF COVID Rapid Response Research (RAPID) award to facilitate information sharing and collaboration across NSF-funded COVID research efforts. The initial focus was on compiling publicly available information from all COVID-related projects funded by the various Directorates across NSF in order to create a easily searchable corpus. In addition to the publicly available information, the CIC also collected self-report information from the projects via a voluntary survey. A webinar series was created, featuring talks by researchers from the NSF-funded COVID RAPID research projects. The CIC Extension will extend this initial CIC effort to also include all projects funded by NSF related to the pandemic recovery phase. In addition, it will seek to include publicly available information on COVID-related efforts beyond those funded by the NSF.

The initial CIC effort clearly demonstrated the benefits of bringing together information about a diverse set of COVID-related projects into a single place, thereby enabling interested users to efficiently search for information and discover linkages among diverse efforts. This helped foster the creation of a community and helped catalyze collaborations. The CIC Extension will carry forward this idea to include projects in the pandemic recovery phase, and will additionally incorporate contemporary ways of interacting with the information such as via search and discovery of linked information using semantic search methods, and the use of domain ontologies and knowledge graph mechanisms.

Broader impact is central to the idea of the COVID Information Commons, which pulls together publicly available information along with voluntary self-report information on NSF-funded COVID-related research projects in order to enable search and discovery of information and collaborations among individual efforts. The CIC has demonstrated early successes in creating such collaborations among researchers from diverse scientific disciplines and from different parts of the country drawn together by their common interest in studying the COVID pandemic. By extending the CIC effort to the pandemic recovery phase, the CIC Extension will reach an even larger and more diverse community of COVID researchers and facilitate networking among researchers engaged in COVID-related research. The CIC Extension will also build upon and expand the successful research webinar series and undergraduate engagement programs initiated in the initial phase of this effort.

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.