Data and Dining: Accela Unlocks Government Data Using Yelp API, Open Data and Twilio SMS

Data and Dining: Accela Unlocks Government Data Using Yelp API, Open Data and Twilio SMS

You can check how many stars your favorite restaurant has on Yelp easily. But stars might not tell the whole story of that restaurant’s health inspection scores, history, and violations. Accela Inc worked with the City of Evanston to make the city’s restaurant health scores publicly available and programmable via SMS.

Relaying resturant data via Twilio SMS was the easy part for Accela Developer Evangelist Seth Axthelm (pictured right).  “It’s so easy and so inexpensive and so powerful,” says Seth. Seth only wrote 50 lines of code, to give any Evanston resident  the ability to text the name and location of a restaurant to a Twilio powered phone number to see its health score and history.

Writing code was a breeze, but standardizing the data that powers the app was an uphill battle.

Data and The Network Effect

To better understand how a bit of siloed data like health inspection records traveled from a government database to an open data platform to Yelp’s API, to Twilio’s API and finally a text message, let’s take a look at the fax machine.

Remember the fax machine? The first fax machine didn’t have much value. When the second, third, and fourth etc. fax machines were up and running, faxing (in the 90s) became a viable and valuable form of communication. That one hunky piece of hardware made it easy to share information because it was so widespread and uniform. Every fax machine could communicate with every other fax machine using the same set of standards. This is called the network effect.

The same principle applies when it comes to data. If you standardize the way you classify and record data, it’s easy for others to use. When it comes to digesting data there is no more literal use case than Accela’s.

Making Data Digestible

Accela worked with Code for America to fly the flag of Open Data, pushing for high quality data standards that could unlock a wealth of governmental data that is either siloed or proprietary. Standardizing that data, and making it open source, can open doors for developers to make a city, its businesses and history more accessible.

Using the platform CivicData.com, which allows any resident to add government data to the site that can then be accessed programmatically via an API, Seth made the first iteration of his health score app.

Using the data standardization model called “LIVES (Local Inspector Value-Entry System)”, you can publish health score data in a particular format than Yelp can consume, and use it in its algorithm to make accessible to all users.

With accessible data in hand, Seth chose the most widely accessible platform to distribute it – SMS. Seth saw SMS as an easily adopted and instant way for anyone to access health standards.

Seth hopes to bring the app to other cities, along with the same set of data standardization. He’s also working on a similar feature that will give any city resident information on building construction, permit requests and construction permits.

Learn more about Accela here.