Yelp's Move To Incorporate Health Inspection Information Is A Huge Step For Open Data

If you knew that your favorite local eatery failed its latest health inspection, would you still eat there? Most of us don’t have to consider that question because restaurant hygiene scores are hard to find—we would have to go out of our way to locate the information on lousy government sites. But that may be about to change. Yelp announced Thursday that health scores will now appear on the site’s listings for San Francisco and New York City restaurants.

But the important thing here isn’t that you can now go to one place to find a restaurant that’s delicious, has decent parking, and sanitary. The real news is the new open data standard, Local Inspector Value-entry Specification (LIVES), that makes this integration possible. The service transforms open government data into meaningful pieces of information that can be delivered to the website or app where health inspection reports are most likely to be useful. By simply presenting sanitation scores to their users, Yelp widens the reach of government data for the public.

This type of public-private collaboration continues is not without precedent. As I described in Future Tense last September, in 2005 Google and TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, partnered up to create in the General Transit Feed Specification, which allowed for bus and train information to be integrated into Google’s Trip Planner—and was soon replicated around the country. But these sorts of common-sense collaborations have been hobbled by insufficient data standards. Yelp’s announcement marks the first significant partnership since Google’s, highlighting the important role that private companies must play in creating data standards for public good...