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
