LIVES Open Data Standard

Restaurant Inspection Scores Anywhere, Accurately

LIVES Data Standard Information for Data Producers, Public Health, & Data Users

About LIVES

1 in 6 Americans contracts food poisoning each year. Over 3,000 die from the illness. While foodborne illness rates vary globally, the importance of helping consumers (especially vulnerable populations) make informed dining decisions is constant. The LIVES data standard is a simple, affordable, and modern way to post restaurant inspection information accurately across information technologies.

History

In 2012, the City of San Francisco's innovation office partnered with New York and Code for America to create a shared data standard for publishing restaurant inspection information as data. LIVES, the Local Inspector Value Entry System, came out of that effort. Yelp, a prominent American consumer review site, was engaged as the first to ingest this data. Since 2012, Yelp has posted inspection scores via LIVES data (which meets Yelp's unique ingest needs) adjacent to consumer's restaurant reviews. While Yelp remains the most prominent user of LIVES data, many other restaurant information providers could ingest and republish LIVES data. Currently, 17 governments (cities, counties, states), in the US and Canada publish LIVES to Yelp. Many others publish LIVES data without publishing to Yelp, because of nuances in their scoring system and how Yelp prefers the data of its own uses.

In 2015, in a partnership with Socrata, Sarah Schacht (then a consultant to Socrata, serving as their Public Health Data Advisor), collaborated with Socrata and Yelp staff to create a version 2.0 of the LIVES standard, allowing for a wider range of environmental and public health organizations to publish their data in LIVES.

Standards Governance

Currently, LIVES has no governing body. While Yelp has certain internal needs for how LIVES is ingested by Yelp's toolset (requiring ZIP files), this is a Yelp requirement and not one created by the collaborative of governments and civil society who created LIVES 1.0.

To provide LIVES a low-cost governance body, Sarah Schacht is working to establish a LIVES stakeholder group with users and producers of LIVES data contributing modifications and agreed upon improvements on a yearly basis. Schacht hopes the stakeholders, after the first year of coordination, can form a stakeholder group on their own. To become a LIVES stakeholder, please contact Ms. Schacht at sarah@smartercivic.com

For Governments: Why Launch LIVES?

Serve high-risk populations
Meet a changing "food tech" market
Drive down foodborne illness rates
Increase citizen reporting of potential outbreaks

LIVES for App Builders & Restaurant Information Resources

Spur faster decisions and purchased carts
Demonstrate commitment to food safety
Differentiate your product by being a comprehensive source of restaurant information
Use LIVES data internally to determine restaurant partners, meal suppliers
Generate earned media through launching LIVES