Open Austin publishes LIVES restaurant inspection scores feed

On Thursday morning, January 17, Code for America and Yelp announced a new data standard called "Local Inspector Value-entry Specification" (or LIVES) for reporting restaurant inspection scores. (See the announcement here.) This standard would allow services such as Yelp to include this valuable data when presenting restaurant information.

About 48 hours later, on Saturday, January 19, Open Austin started publishing a LIVES data feed for Austin, TX.

We'd like to claim it was mad coding skills that allowed us to erect this data feed in record time. Truth is, this is the awesome power of open government data.

The City of Austin already was publishing restaurant inspection scores on the city data portal. You can find that information here: https://data.austintexas.gov/dataset/Restaurant-Inspection-Scores/ecmv-9xxi

It took just a couple hours on a Saturday afternoon to convert the existing data into LIVES format.

The data feed is published here: http://data.open-austin.org/lives.ci.austin.tx.us.zip

The data converter has been published as open source here: https://github.com/chip-rosenthal/atx-lives-feed

We have contacted both the City of Austin and Yelp about the feed. We'll let you know if there is any news.

Jan 24 update: Both the City of Austin and Yelp have responded with interest. We're hoping that Yelp will pick up the Austin feed, once they are done integrating their current data sources.