Go to the website ockovani.opendatalab.cz to get an overview of the openings to get vaccinated against COVID-19. The goal of the application is to give Czechs a quick overview of vaccination capacity, which, until now, hasn’t been available anywhere. The application was developed by Marek Sušický and Jan Staněk from OpenDataLab, the joint workplace of the Faculty of Information Technology of the Czech Technical University in Prague (FIT CTU) and the company Profinit. The open data that is now being published by the Czech government also helped them with the application.
At the moment, there are big differences between vaccination locations regarding how easy it is to get vaccinated against COVID-19. In some places, it is difficult to round up suitable people to vaccinate, in others, people wait for weeks to no avail. However, the reservation system doesn’t let you choose a place according to where there is capacity. To get an overview of capacity, you’ll need to go to the new web application ockovani.opendatalab.cz, created by the experts at OpenDataLab. Their work is an example of the possibilities of open data, which in this case helps people do what’s most important—protect their health.
“When a colleague and I tried to get vaccination appointments for relatives in January, we found that there was nowhere to look at an overview of openings,” says Marek Sušický regarding how they came up with the idea. “So, we started to look into how we could help with open data, which is what we do professionally. Initially, however, we didn’t have official open data for our application, so we made the first version of the application purely as a personal project and based it on unofficial data. But then that changed at the beginning of March when the data was released by the Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic. And that’s why we’ve moved the application under OpenDataLab,” he adds regarding the subsequent development of the web application.
Currently, website traffic is just over 10,000 hits a day, and it is rising every day. “We are constantly expanding the website, and we also get a lot of comments and ideas for improvement from programmers and users. If the government publishes more detailed data, we will definitely include it in the overview,” says Sušický regarding further development of the web application.
FIT CTU and Profinit EU jointly opened OpenDataLab in 2019. It is a place where students can try working with open data sources. The lab gives them the opportunity to examine data from transport services, government management, the environment, and many other fields and do it as a semester or final thesis. Their output, as well as the output of their instructors, actually helps improve the quality of life in the Czech Republic.
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