The online map was developed by a group of five Vietnamese engineers from Kompa Group, a tech company based in Vietnam and Silicon Valley.

The interactive map, which can be accessed via the link corona.kompa.ai, tracks the novel coronavirus' spread as well as official news updates in real time, VnExpress reports. It features two infection maps for Vietnam and the world and a column where links of news from local media are aggregated.

According to Vong Thanh Cuong, the leader of the development group, the map is a response to a lack of a Vietnamese-language real-time visualization of the recent coronavirus spread and the increasing rise of misinformation online surrounding the pandemic. It's also available in English.

The group, which consists of a developer team in Vietnam and a data science team in the United States, started working on the interactive map on January 30 by collecting online discussions about the new virus and using them as a corpus for analysis. The analysis is then done through natural language processing, a method which programs computers to crunch a large natural language dataset. The goal is to find topics most-wanted by online users and filter out unreliable information sources.

The group then came up with the map’s main features and integrated information from the World Health Organization and Vietnam's Ministry of Health. Within the week since the website launched, it has received a lot of visitors from Vietnam, as well as other countries, according to the news source. 

In other news, the new coronavirus now has an official name - Covid-19 - according to the World Health Organization. Recently, a group of scientists from the School of Biotechnology and Food Technology under the Hanoi University of Science and Technology developed a test kit for the CoVid-19 that only takes 70 minutes, instead of three hours, to yield results.

[Photo via corona.kompa.ai]