1. Open data & Yelp: The LIVES Project By: Karina Salehi, LIVES Project Lead @ Yelp
My name is Karina Salehi and I help lead the LIVES project at Yelp.
I’ve been at Yelp for 2 ½ years and started working on LIVES at the beginning of 2015.

2. Approx. 83 million unique monthly visitors on mobile (App and Mobile site)
79 million UMVs on desktop
More than 83 million reviews contributed since inception
Approx. 68% of all searches on Yelp came from mobile (mobile web & app)
Yelp is present across 32 countries
Lots of traffic on Yelp – making Yelp an ideal platform for important gov. data.

3. The LIVES Project
Mobile
Desktop
This is what LIVES looks like

4. Health Inspections and Yelp?
Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification (LIVES)
Open data initiative developed in 2012
Governments share Health inspections data on Yelp businesses pages
8 regions are part of the LIVES program
LIVES is growing!
To give you a bit of history, LIVES,
an open data initiative, was developed in 2012.
The goal of LIVES was and still is to allow governments to list Health inspection data onto highly trafficked Yelp pages. This program was successfully launched when Yelp combined forces with Code For America the city of San Francisco and the city of New York.

5. What is Open Data? Ideally, government open data is:
Machine-readable / structured
Easy to find
Easy to download
High value
Up to date
LIVES is an initiative based off of Open data principles.
Public participation and collaboration is key to the success of open data. Open data enables the public to participate in government by providing downloadable datasets to build applications, conduct analyses, and perform research

6. Why is Open Data good? Promotes Civic Responsibility
Prevents Food Bourne Illnesses (Health Inspection Open Data)
Ushering in new Industry
Accela, Socrata
By sharing data we are creating active citizens
In regards to sharing health inspection data, we are preventing illnesses and saving lives
We have also seen that as more initiatives a new data management industry has blossomed.
Accela and Socrata a are two examples
Organizations working with city governments

7. “Don't make people find the data -- make the data find the people."
- Tim O’Reilly
Tim O’Reilly – founder of O’Reilly Media, (company that publishes books, websites and produces conference on technology topics)
In the same vein as “Open data” O’reilly coined the term “open source”
I think that this quote is really telling as O’Reilly states that we shouldn’t just have data available, but we should be displaying that data on platforms that are being trafficked.
Approx. 83 million UMVs via mobile
More than 83 million reviews contributed since inception
Approx. 68% of all searches on Yelp came from mobile (mobile web & app)

8. Traffic on Yelp
Healthy growth, particularly on mobile

9. Yelp’s Mission
“Yelp's mission is to connect people with great local businesses; along the way, we hope to enrich lives of consumers and small business owners.” - Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO
The second quote here is from Yelp’s CEO, Jeremy Stoppleman. I pulled this quote from Yelp’s Official Blog post on the launch of LIVES.
We can really get a sense of Jeremy’s vision to empower and protect consumers

10. Health scores data is live in 8 different municipalities.
If you’re on desktop you can see the Health inspection result on the bottom right corner.
From there you can click to the Health scores page.

11. LIVES Today The LIVES program is active in 8 US municipalities.
Most recent launch was in Boulder, CO.

12. “Analog” Open Data Success Story: County of Los Angeles
At Yelp, we understand the importance and value of the work that health departments do across the country and around the world.
If analog works so well, what if we did this in the digital world?
Yelp sees an Average of 79 million monthly visitors on desktop and 83 million visitors on mobile devices - and those are unique visitors.

13. LIVES Today
The LIVES standard is listed on yelp.com/healthscores. LIVES requires that data be presented in several CSV files consolidated in a single ZIP file. The csv files need to be saved under specific names.
If interested in LIVES:
Look at examples. (SF, Louisville, Boulder)
healthscores.com & notify us of your interest to build a LIVES feed and participate.
When we respond, build a beta feed.
Work with Yelp to de-bug and publish.

14. LIVES Today
Since our time is limited today, I thought we could quickly go over just three of the files.
Businesses. Csv
Inspection.csv
Violations.csv (the Violations.csv is no required)

15. LIVES Today
Required information for matching businesses to Yelp pages:
A unique ID – often times, this is the license numbers:
The business’s Name
The Street address of a business
The City
*Providing more information only helps with matching
This file includes all of the unique contact information used so that Yelp can match a city’s list of businesses to business pages on Yelp.
We use this data for back end matching purposes only.

16. LIVES Today
Result
For cities that do not capture a score, this string represents the non-numeric result of the inspection.
The string must be 4 characters or shorter.
Examples: Pass, Fail, Cond
The inspections.csv is the file that we pull a score from. We recently updated our standard so that if a city does not generate scores, we can accommodate “results” instead.

18. LIVES Today
Critical
Describes whether the violation is critical or not. This must be a true or false value.
The Violations.csv not required, but I thought I would mention it since it was recently updated. The violations.csv is used for when governments want to break down a score by providing brief descriptions of the violations.
Recently, we added the critical field so that violations can be broken up into “critical” and “non critical”

20. LIVES Today: Recent Updates
What about non-scoring jurisdictions?
Pass/Fail/Cond.
More transparency for consumers
“critical” or “non-critical” violations
One of reasons why I love working on LIVES is because of the collaboration that goes on. We have been working hard on making the program better for consumers and for governments. Just to recap on those updated to the spec,
These changes will accommodate different governments and make things easier to understand from a user perspective. We have a new field titled "result" for non-scoring jurisdictions. So for example, some cities don’t want to give a number or letter grade, but rather have a Pass or Fail result. This change will make that possible. We also have a field titled as "critical" to allow counties to classify their violations as critical vs non-critical. This makes a lot of sense to users who might see a lot of violation but not understand why a score is so high - those violations can now be labeled as non-critical which will help explain the Health Inspection.

21. LIVES: What is next?
“The deployment of inspectors is usually fairly random, which means time is often wasted on spot checks at clean, rule-abiding restaurants. Social media can help narrow the search for violators.”
- Luther Lowe & Michael Luca, “City Governments Are Using Yelp to Tell You Where Not to Eat”,
83 Mil reviews on Yelp
Yelp could help city governments prioritize resources

22. Yelp.com/healthscores Healthscores@yelp.com Karina@yelp.com
us!