Yelp partners with NYC and SF on restaurant inspection data

A joint effort by New York City, San Francisco, and Yelp brings government health data into Yelp reviews.

One of the key notions in my “Government as a Platform” advocacy has been that there are other ways to partner with the private sector besides hiring contractors and buying technology. One of the best of these is to provide data that can be used by the private sector to build or enrich their own citizen-facing services. Yes, the government runs a weather website but it’s more important that data from government weather satellites shows up on the Weather Channel, your local TV and radio stations, Google and Bing weather feeds, and so on. They already have more eyeballs and ears combined than the government could or should possibly acquire for its own website.

That’s why I’m so excited to see a joint effort by New York City, San Francisco, and Yelp to incorporate government health inspection data into Yelp reviews. I was involved in some early discussions and made some introductions, and have been delighted to see the project take shape.

My biggest contribution was to point to GTFS as a model. Bibiana McHugh at the city of Portland’s TriMet transit agency reached out to Google, Bing, and others with the question: “If we came up with a standard format for transit schedules, could you use it?” Google Transit was the result — a service that has spread to many other U.S. cities. When you rejoice in the convenience of getting transit timetables on your phone, remember to thank Portland officials as well as Google.

In a similar way, Yelp, New York, and San Francisco came up with a data format for health inspection data. The specification is at http://yelp.com/healthscores. It will reportedly be announced at the US Conference of Mayors with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee today.

Code for America built a site for other municipalities to pledge support. I’d also love to see support in other local restaurant review services from companies like Foursquare, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!  This is, as Chris Anderson of TED likes to say, “an idea worth spreading.”

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