Covid Travel Check

We provide fast and reliable information on the requirements and the protocols to follow, to make sure that your international travels during the pandemic are easy and headache free.

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Inspiration

With people getting vaccinated and the restrictions being lifted, we as a group of students and friends from various universities from Barcelona decided to start going to Hackathons in person. Easier said than done, the amount headaches in problems we had to face trying to find accurate and up to date information was a literal nightmare. Initially we had planned to come in a team of 4 but sadly 2 could not come, due to not meeting the criterias of access, and were not able to make it in time.

What it does

The whole idea of our project is to provide update to date, reliable information regarding international travel protocols through a web app and APIs.

How we built it

We decided that the most reliable way to built our application was to, scrape data from governamental websites regarding Covid protocols using Selenium , and some third party APIs to make the information available through a public API and a Web-App, built using Django for the backend and React as the frontend. Finally the API is deployed on Google Cloud.

Challenges we ran into

For the API,one of the most critical parts of this project was to ensure that the data we are providing is reliable, just thinking about having to take make scripts for scraping data specifically for each country's website seemed like an enormous task to handle, therefore we decided to focus on just a select few.

As for the Front-end, the biggest issue was making a page that took the information from the API and then update the table of contents based on the select inputs, so I changed how the page was structured to fill all the content in a single page, using the table of the results as a separate component that took the information as props for then to print it inside of it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Well we are proud of making our first public API and deploying it in the cloud. We're also proud of creating a good looking Web-App that can display that information.

What we learned

We learned how to scrape for data online and save it into a structured manner, and how to present and deploy the said information.

What's next for Covid Travel Check

Maybe with the addition of some NLP algorithms we could have made something more scalable, and easier to process the information scraped from websites.

At the same time we should also work on putting the finishing touches on the frontend side to make the web-app fully functional and user friendly.

Finally we would have liked to add the functionality to send the information using Twilio through email or sms.

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