Don't Eat At ______ & DC's Food Establishment Inspection Reports

[Justin Grimes]

Don't Eat At ______

http://donteat.at/

Here is a fun little civic app that uses NYC's public restaurant inspection dataset to display health code violations. Mashes data up with Foursquare  to display violations as tips when users check in.

This might be something we can try to replicate in DC. Unlike NYC, DC doesn't make their data available through a nice dataset or an API but they do provide information online.

We can scrape this data from DOH website see here http://washington.dc.gegov.com/webadmin/dhd_431/web/index.cfm and then map it or use foursquare similar to Don't Eat At _____ app.

Here is an example of a Food Establishment Inspection Report

http://washington.dc.gegov.com/webadmin/dhd_431/lib/mod/inspection/paper/_paper_food_inspection_report.cfm?inspectionID=158174&wguid=1367&wgunm=sysact&wgdmn=431

Liz - Do you know if we can get a cleaner data dump from DOH? or can you confirm that DOH doesn't make this data available as a dataset/api. If not do you have a point of contact for DOH?

Justin

[Liz Pruszko Steininger]

It looks like the data was on data.dc.gov, at some point: http://data.dc.gov/Metadata.aspx?id=2780, but I don't see any download options, now. So, I'm checking on it.

As for the app, I think it would be nice to know that info before you went to the trouble of going to the restaurant and checking in on Foursquare. I'd want to know when I was making plans. (Of course, I could use that online search, but it is ugly and I don't want to read the reports.) Maybe simplify the report to 1 rating and mash it up with Yelp's rating, as a way to find popular but also safe (in terms of passing inspections) places to eat? Just an idea.

Justin

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Liz Steininger

Email: l...@tapangi.com

Mobile: 202.505.1315

Twitter: @Liz315

Organizer, Rails Girls DC

Co-Founder, Tapangi Consulting

[Harlan Harris]

Interesting. I wonder if there are quasi standard web API designs for restaurant inspection data? Presumably one would want to separate the API interface to the data from the apps that would use that data. In theory the city should provide the API for business to write products around. But it would be a nice public service for us to implement that API based on periodically scraped data. If the city decided to take that over based directly on their databases at some point, client apps could just point somewhere different.

Harlan

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[SR]

Somebody recently did a similar thing that might be helpful: http://inspectionmapper.com. I found it via this post on DCist, which has some other useful information.

[Liz Pruszko Steininger]

Update: I checked with the Citywide Data Warehouse team at OCTO. If you want that dataset back on data.dc.gov, you need to contact DOH and let them know.