Consume or publish a municipal food-inspection feed in the LIVES (Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification) format
domain: yelp.com · 4 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
LIVES is the open CSV-based standard co-developed by Yelp, San Francisco, and New York City in 2012 for municipalities to publish inspection data onto Yelp business pages
A conformant feed is a single ZIP containing comma-delimited CSV files: businesses.csv and inspections.csv (required) and feed_info.csv (required, a single row describing the feed), plus optional violations.csv and legend.csv for mapping jurisdiction-specific codes to plain text
Every CSV's first line must be a header row of field names; values containing commas, quotes, tabs, or newlines must be quoted
To consume inspection data for analysis rather than publish a feed, prefer the source city's own Socrata dataset where available (e.g. SF's tvy3-wexg, NYC's 43nn-pn8j) since those expose the same underlying data via a queryable API instead of a static ZIP
Known gotchas
LIVES is a file-drop/ZIP specification, not a live query API - there is no endpoint to filter or page through; the whole feed must be downloaded and parsed
legend.csv is optional and only needed when a jurisdiction uses non-obvious internal score/result codes; feeds without it assume self-explanatory values in inspections.csv
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