Dados governamentais abertos sobre a COVID-19 no Brasil: avaliação do potencial de reúso

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, access to data on the disease became strategic for controlling public health measures. In view of the health emergency, a large volume of data needed to be minimally organized and made available quickly and automatically, making up open government data. After two years of the pandemic and with the aim of presenting an overview of the publication of open data by the Brazilian federal government on COVID-19, this study sought to evaluate the open government data made available through the Application Programming Interface. The methodology involved identifying datasets on COVID-19 in Brazil, in the Application Programming Interface, up to April 2022, analyzing the documentation and evaluating it using the DGABr metric. The evaluation considered the five perspectives of the metric that measures fundamental elements of open government data, essential for interoperability and consequently reuse of data, and was based on published documentation. As a result, open government data on COVID-19, made available via Application Programming Interface, scored well on the metric, reaching level 4. This result indicates that the use of APIs was an important and agile technological resource for organizing and making open government data available, encouraging its reuse. However, it is important to highlight that this availability to society was late, requires constant improvements, especially in technical issues such as linking data with other sources, and that effective reuse actions were limited to data visualization panels on COVID-19.