Data Stewardship Wizard helps to fight COVID-19 inside VODAN-in-a-Box

VODAN-in-a-Box was deployed into practice by VODAN (Virus Outbreak Data Network) Africa, being a GO FAIR Foundation-supported Implementation Network that brings together several universities and hospitals across Africa with professors and graduates from Leiden´s University. It was set up to enable access to critically important data from Africa and the rest of the world to help fight and contain the COVID-19 outbreak. The toolset facilitates capturing data related to the COVID-19 and metadata describing these datasets. The DSW serves in this project as a data collection tool or so-called "CRF Wizard". It is used for entering and analyzing patient data from the case report forms (CRFs). This data is automatically stored in the RDF triple-store and metadata in the FAIR Data Point, so the VODAN-in-a-Box fully complies with all the FAIR principles by making the data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, which is one of the key aspects when fighting any worldwide virus outbreak, not only COVID-19. The VODAN-in-a-Box was first installed at Kampala International University in Uganda, Africa on July 22, 2020, then installations in Ethiopia (2 installations), Nigeria, Kenya, Tunisia and Zimbabwe followed shortly after that, and now the solution is widely used by the VODAN Africa community in general. The whole VODAN-in-a-Box solution is publicly available, therefore, anyone can try it and deploy it for their own use and also participate in the development under the open-source model.