Developed as a non-commercial and not-for-profit public good.
This COVID-Navigator was conceived to fill what was identified as a void in the marketplace that was adversely impacting the ability to quickly discover and access emerging guidance related to the pandemic. Search engines are wonderful tools, especially when the target of your search is known, but they are much more difficult to use when it is unclear exactly what is being searched for. Moreoever, as COVID presented a new threat, our understanding of this disease continues to change daily, and discovery of relevant information is increasingly difficult to find.
The purpose of the COVID Navigator is to provide a complementary tool to search portals. At the heart of the Navigator is a visual Graph depicting interrelationships among key facets that contextualize guidance, treatments, activities, and knowledge around this space. The data is organized in such as way that these interrelationships can be “navigated” organically – woven together based on common threads, which can be explored based on a user’s interests. The visual depiction “connects the dots” between seemingly different results, but allowing for a more natural insight to guide the users toward discoveries that might otherwise not have been made.
Note that the COVID-Navigator and the team behind it are NOT content curators. Assets referenced in the site are provided in good faith, with the contributing or authoritative sources linked and accessible via the portal. A lightweight vetting to remove clearly non-credible sources is performed, but otherwise we leave it to the user to determine the quality, efficacy, and utility of the sources referenced.