Any API is only as valuable as the quality of data that it provides. With the current Coronavirus outbreak, aggregating quality data is especially challenging. Scott Ge highlighted an instance where changes in the data provided by a source represented a breaking change:
“Breaking changes or data issues are very common in many data sources. As an example: Johns Hopkins’ data uses country name, state name and county name to uniquely identify a location. They change country names very often. A few weeks ago, they completely stopped providing county-level data in the US. I’m one of their very early users. They were my main data source at the beginning, but I really suffered from those breaking changes. So I decided to stop relying on them, by taking a lot more data sources and using AI and other technologies to cross-check and validate.”
