Open Government Data on COVID-19 in Brazil: assessing the Reuse Potential

Abstract:

In the COVID-19 pandemic, access to data on the disease has become strategic for controlling public health measures. Faced with the health emergency, a large volume of data needed to be minimally organized and made available in a quick and automated way, composing the open government data. After two years of a pandemic and in order to present an overview of the publication of open data by the federal government of Brazil, on COVID-19, this study sought to evaluate the open government data made available through the Application Programming Interface (API). The methodology involved the identification of datasets on COVID-19 in Brazil, in Application Programming Interface, until April 2022, the analysis of the documentation and the evaluation using the DGABr metric. The evaluation considered the five perspectives of the metric that measures fundamental elements about the open government data, essential for interoperability and consequently reuse of the data and was based on the published documentation. As results, the open government data on COVID-19, made available in Application Programming Interface, presented a good score in the metric, reaching level 4. This result indicates that the use of APIs was an important and agile technological resource for the organization and availability of open government data, promoting its reuse. However, it is important to highlight that this availability to society was late, it needs constant improvements, mainly in technical issues such as the connection of data with other sources, and that the effective reuse actions were limited to data visualization panels on COVID-19.

Keywords:
open government data; open data; COVID-19; API; reuse