covid19/keywords/README.md

Keywords

This code finds trending web searches related to the COVID-19 pandemic using Google trends (collect_trends.py). It then searches for relevant keywords on Wikidata (wikidata_search) in order to find high-quality translations of important words and phrases (wikidata_translations.py). The goal is to support efforts expanding the Observatory to information in many languages beyond English.

We search the Wikidata API for entities in src/wikidata_search.py and then we make simple SPARQL queries in src/wikidata_translations.py to collect labels and aliases the entities. The labels come with language metadata. This seems to provide a decent initial list of relevant terms across multiple languages.

The output data lives at covid19.communitydata.science.

The output files have 4 colums:

• itemid links to the wikidata entity
• label is the translation of the relevant keyword
• langcode is the iso 639-1 code corresponding the language of the label.
• is_alt indicates whether the label is an alias.