Data Hub Demo for Ghana
Give me a spin, I'm your Data Hub in action!
The Data Hub is an open-source software framework for spatiotemporal data curation, harmonization, and collaboration — modular in design and deployable on-premise. It is tailored to the needs of Global Health research teams and integrates diverse data layers across health, demographic, socioeconomic, environmental, meteorological, and infrastructure domains, among others. Data availability, resolution, and timeliness reflect the respective original sources. This demo instance covers the region of Ghana from 2020 to 2025. Ghana was chosen as a demo region due to its long-standing partnership with the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine, which maintains the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine (KCCR) in Kumasi.
Shapes
Ghana is a West African country bordered by Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and Côte d'Ivoire to the west, with a southern coastline along the Gulf of Guinea. The landscape transitions from coastal plains in the south through forested highlands in the center to savanna regions in the north. Population is concentrated in the southern half, particularly around the capital Accra and the inland commercial center of Kumasi.
The country is organized into administrative units, ranging from terrestrial plains to regions, districts and councils.
The Data Hub currently holds shapes from the following types:
You can find an overview of all shapes in the Shapes section. From there, you can explore individual spatial units and access them via API or as downloadable files for further analysis. The data originates from Ghana Statistical Service and was published via the Humanitarian Data Exchange Platform (HDX) by OCHA West and Central Africa, last updated October 2021.
Data Layers
Data Layers are compiled from both user-contributed and open data sources, with some layers derived from the same source. You can browse the full catalog via the Data Layers overview, or use the Shapes or Location Picker to discover all available Data Layers for a specific spatial unit of interest.
Each Data Layer can be explored in depth through a Summary Panel — see the Forest land cover data layer as an example. The panel features interactive map previews and temporal visualizations that reveal spatial distributions and trends over time. It also includes detailed metadata covering data coverage, quality indicators, and statistical attributes. Data can be accessed via API or as downloadable files.
Tools
The Tools section hosts extensions built on the core Data Hub framework — ranging from enhanced data layer interactions to analytical pipelines and data products such as dashboards or interactive maps. One example is the Location Picker, which retrieves contextual data layers for any given coordinate — useful for example to enrich event-based surveillance or early warning systems with local context. New tools are continuously developed and shared here as open-source extensions, where relevant to the community.
Docs
The Documentation section provides project-relevant reference material, including a Project Summary and auxiliary documentation such as Use Case Overview, Shapefile History, Terms of Use, and the Changelog. Project teams maintain documentation as Markdown files in their project workspace (e.g., GitHub).
Found our work useful?
If you used the Data Hub for data processing, metadata integration, or visualization in your work, please cite it as a contributing service:
Ströbele, J., & Boenecke, J. (2025). Data Hub (Version 0.11.12) [Computer software]. https://github.com/datasnack/datahub