Data Visualisation and Blockchain

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, numerous fake news has been rampant throughout various streams in social media on the outbreak as well as spreading, contamination, of the deadly virus. Blockchain as a computational trust protocol platform can blend well with Data Visualisation Tools, in order to create trust on the data among the public. The source of the information nowadays is at a premium in the time of the current pandemic. There is a growing supply of data from various sources about the virus, but the information is not necessarily easy to visualize, consume, extract and trust in a simple way.

In the process of combining data visualisation and blockchain the data is digested into the whole system and a reference file including the data and meta data is created that matches this information to the source. This file of data is then confirmed by a blockchain or distributed ledger technology were a ‘timestamp’ of when the information was received and from what source is surely recorded and publicly available for others to review.

The distributed ledger technology or Blockchain is a way to provide the public a tamperproof transaction log of everything. It is vital to understand the provenance of these data and be able to trace back how it has been used. Blockchain is vital in this respect, in knowing the source and reliability of the data. Tools like the Hedera Hashgraph DLT can be vital in providing this information. It is a kind of blockchain technology in helping to achieve ‘computational trust’ of public health data. The current ethos among the public at every step is to give up all our personal privacy. This is problematic in the long term, and there is a need to prioritize technology that can help us advance public health while preserving personal privacy. Blockchain alone does not alone deliver this privacy, however it can be blended with technologies like analytics and machine learning in order to persevere the personal privacy data from unauthorised tampering. Also, visualisation tools like HashLog is a help in this regard which combines the platform like, a data analytics dashboard and a blockchain or DLT platform to develop applications in order to ensure computational trust, transparency and tamper-proof environment. In India too there are a lot of tech companies which get involved with government to deliver correct and reliable data among the public during the time of health and pandemic crisis like Gok – District Kerala by QKopy, Telegram (in Karnataka). But all these technologies and much more in the future can be still build upon by enabling it with blockchain to fight with the pandemic or epidemics.

The first 20 years of this century have seen massive digital disruption, forcing companies to reinvent themselves continually. While some companies quickly pivot to meet immediate crisis related needs, others will have to revaluate how their core business will be able to flourish in an entirely new landscape which could be the “next normal.” The coronavirus is not only a health crisis of immense proportion, but it is also an imminent restructuring of the global economic order. And this demands readiness among the partners and world in terms of data feeds, data sharing, better preparedness levels, new strategy and much more beyond. Hence the more trustable data is floated around the economy in the world, the more helpful it would be for the companies to tackle this kind of pandemic. World has become a tricky place to live in which demands more and more data from a trustable source 24*7. This is just the start, who knows what the human kind would have to fight in the future.