Frequently Asked Questions

What is DEEP? What can DEEP do for me?

DEEP, the Data Entry and Exploration Platform, is a collaborative platform for humanitarian analysts to generate rapidly actionable data for effective response. It offers a suite of tools and collaborative workflows for compiling, storing and structuring qualitative information. Although the platform is meant to be a collaborative space, it is open-source and available to be deployed in private server environments.

The platform can support a variety of work-streams requiring solutions for managing qualitative data such as:

• Secondary Data Review 
• Protection Monitoring 
• Participatory Assessments
• Risk Analysis
• Assessment Registry

You can find other useful information in this doc DEEP in Short

What are the new features in DEEP in the new release?

We have worked in a whole new look and feel and performance for DEEP, so you get upgraded with an overhauled user experience. If you like to see what is new, you can read more about it in this post! (make sure you don’t miss the videos) 

We anticipate the new version of the platform being live at the end of 2021.

DEEP is a free service – will it continue to be that?

Free and open source for the win! But to develop the tool we get funding from partners that support the new features of the DEEP. Most recently, USAID BHA provided long term funding for the project.

Here you can look at our license.

How do I access DEEP?

Visit our website https://thedeep.io/  and click “Access DEEP”. 

In order to achieve an optimal DEEP experience, you will need to use the latest version of the Google Chrome browser which can be obtained here. DEEP will work with other browsers to a varying degree, however the page layout may be a bit strange and some features may be missing.

 While you're at it, you can also download the Chrome extension from the Chrome store here. For more information on how to use the extension, you can see this help article.

How can I access data already in DEEP? Can I see an overview of what is already in DEEP?

While DEEP is intended to be a collaborative environment, information is siloed by projects whose data is only visible to project members. Within projects, there are different user roles based on document confidentiality.

If you’d like to simply checkout what data is in DEEP, you can use the tool’s explore function that shows an overview of what’s in the platform. Note that project metadata is always made public, unless it is a project that has been made private.

How can I set up my own project in DEEP? How can I make my project a collaborative project?

Anyone can sign in to DEEP and make their own projects, or request to join other projects. By default, projects are publicly visible and users can request to join them, or talk to administrators.

When creating a project, you may either use existing frameworks in the platform, or create one from scratch.

Projects in DEEP can be made private under certain circumstances where the context of the work is sensitive. When a project is marked private, it does not appear in DEEP’s Explore page, and its framework is also hidden. Contact [e-mail] if you or your organization would like to have a private project on the platform.

How can I use DEEP to structure my data?

When using DEEP, users can take qualitative information and structure snippets, or entries, into standardized analysis frameworks. The process is currently manual but with our upcoming Natural Language Processing features, it will be a semi-automated process.

What is an analysis framework and how do I set that up?

 Analysis frameworks are models that aim to guide and to structure an analyst’s thinking in a systematic manner. Frameworks within the humanitarian sector are often both needs and risk based. A good framework ensures the data is structured to have tangible outcomes. Analytical outcomes can be used to answer questions such as “what are key priority needs?” and “what are the current gaps in humanitarian response?”. 

You can read more on Analysis frameworks, and specifics on how to set them up, as well as on Secondary Data Reviews here. 

What document formats are supported by DEEP?

DEEP is intended to support as wide an array of inputs as possible to support the qualitative data review process. Currently the platform supports:

• URLs (and ingesting their contents)
• PDFs
• Word files
• Excel files (limited support)
• PDFs

Can I connect to other platforms? Can I add existing APIs to DEEP?

DEEP can connect to a number of existing humanitarian data repositories, and we’re always looking to add more. Currently, documents and news can be directly ingested from:

• ReliefWeb
• Post Disaster Needs Assessment
• Humanitarian Response
• ACAPS Briefing Notes
• UNHCR Portal
• World Food Programme Assessment Bank

If you’d like to connect to platforms other than these, you can create a custom RSS ingestor in DEEP.

Note that you can always directly add content (files, links) to DEEP directly, regardless of where they come from.

Can I connect DEEP to my external tool? Tableau, PowerBI, Python/R script etc?

Indeed you can 🤓. DEEP’s content is exposed via an API that authenticates with your login information, and can see all the data your user account can. You can check it out here: https://api.thedeep.io/api-docs/. 

Does DEEP support tagging in an intelligent way?

We’ve spent most of 2021 working hard to ensure that we can develop Natural Language Processing systems to assist the tagging process. In early 2022, we’ll be rolling features where DEEP will provide recommendations for tagging based on common humanitarian frameworks. In the future, we envision making the assisted tagging process available to any framework on the platform.

Currently, DEEP will provide annotation recommendations for the following categories:

• Context
• Shock/Events
• Casualties
• Displacement
• Humanitarian Access
• Information and Communication
• COVID-19 Response, and 
• Sector/cluster specific: (Agriculture, Cross-sectoral, Education, Food Security. Health, Livelihoods, Logistics, Nutrition, Protection, Shelter, WASH)
• Humanitarian Conditions
• Capacities & Response
• Impact
• Priority Interventions
• At Risk
• Priority Needs
• Gender
• Age
• Specific needs groups
• Location
• Severity
• Reliability
• Affected groups

How can I ensure control of quality in my project?

Over the years of eating our own dog food, we’ve learned that the platform needs some robust quality control in particular among larger and more solid teams. To support this, the platform allows for:

• Designation of a specific quality controller user role
• Comments and discussion can be left on specific entries (or snippets) that have been tagged, and follow-up actions assigned to specific users in a project
• A specific quality control label for individual entries, that a quality controller would flag once the quality control process has been completed
• An overview in projects of what percentage of content has been reviewed, and how much is still left (including who the most active users have been)

Can I summarize and analyze my data in DEEP?

Indeed you can, inquisitive reader. We are soon to roll out an Analysis Module feature in DEEP (see the end of the 2nd video in this post) that will allow you to use DEEP to create analytical statements and information gaps, all within the same platform.

How do I export data in DEEP?  What type of outputs can I get from DEEP? 

We have an export module where you can download all your tagged sources in a very nicely structured way, based on the categories defined on your framework.

We can get outputs in multiple formats:

1. Word documents
2. Excel documents
3. PDF Documents
4. JSON Format

We can configure these exports based on the categories defined on your framework. See the above section for how to export data using an API.