San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee and Yelp CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman announced on Thursday the integration of government restaurant health data with the business review website Yelp.
Lee and Stoppelman made the announcement at the U. S. Conference of Mayors Technology and Innovation Task Force.
Lee said that he considers this partnership "another significant step in the Open Data movement," in a press release.
"By making often hard-to-find government information more widely available to innovative companies like Yelp, we can make government more transparent and improve public health outcomes for our residents through the power of technology," Lee continued.
City inspectors will be using the Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification (LIVES) to upload the restaurant health inspection scores to Yelp. Initially, only San Francisco and New York municipalities will be able to use the service, but other cities like Philadelphia will start participating over the next few weeks.
