BoaC is a language and an infrastructure for deeper analysis of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) provided by the Allen Institute for AI.

Why BoaC?

Our hope is that Boa for COVID-19 can help with solving the COVID-19 problem by analyzing text for COVID-19 papers. Some examples of such questions include but are not limited to:

• What antiviral drugs have been tested against coronaviruses?
• What drugs are effective and what are ineffective?
• There are many types of vaccines (inactivated vaccines, modified live virus vaccines, subunit vaccines, DNA vaccines, mRNA vaccines, genetically engineered vaccines, etc.). What types of vaccines have been developed and evaluated against different coronaviruses?
• What has been the conclusion on the effectiveness of the vaccine candidates?
• What are the origins of coronaviruses? How have the coronaviruses been transmitted (cross-species or not)?

Who is behind BoaC?

The BoaC project is led by Hridesh Rajan at Iowa State University and Robert Dyer at University of Nebraska - Lincoln. The project also involves PhD students Yijia Huang and Rangeet Pan. We have also significantly benefited from our collaborators Simon Geletta, a professor of public health, Jianqiang Zhang, and Tomislav Jelesijević both faculty in veterinary medicine and experts in virology and coronaviruses.

Getting Started With BoaC in 3 Minutes

Why are we asking you to register?

The registration is to prevent abuse of our limited computational resources by web robots and to limit certain attacks on our cyberinfrastructure. We have experienced bots automatically crafting and submitting queries to launch denial of service attacks against our cyberinfrastructure.

How long does it take to complete registration?

The registration is very quick and one of us is usually able to activate your account at a short notice.

What are some key current capabilities?

The BoaC cyberinfrastructure already provides the following capabilities and we are adding more capabilities as we speak.

Basic search capabilities. BoaC's search capabilities include:

• The ability to search through the articles.
• Limit your search to exact phrase.
• Exclude certain words from your search.
• Limit your search to title, abstract, or body of the articles.
• Limit your search by publication date of the articles.

Advanced text analysis. The BoaC infrastructure also provides the capability to search through every part of the paper including the body of the paper and references. This data is stored in a structured form and your analytics can browse over that structure. This includes the ability to:

• Analyze each part of the paper including title, abstract, all sections, references.
• Analyze metadata including authors, affiliation, etc. and make search decisions based on that.
• Analyze references and do cross-linking between various sections of a paper.
• Analyze cited references, and accumulate papers citing certain papers.
• Remove stop words during analysis to focus on important contents.
• Much more coming soon...