Home / LIVES
LIVES: the restaurant inspection data standard
The Local Inspector Value-entry Specification was launched in January 2013 to let any city publish inspection results in one format. Here is what it defines and what became of it.
LIVES, the Local Inspector Value-entry Specification, is an open data format for restaurant inspection results. A health department that publishes in LIVES format produces a small set of CSV files that any website can read, so a restaurant's inspections can appear next to its listing without custom work for each city. Yelp hosts the specification and is its main consumer. This page describes what the format contains and how its adoption went; it is not affiliated with Yelp or Code for America.
Who built it, and when
Yelp announced LIVES on January 17, 2013, writing that the standard "was co-developed by Yelp and the technology departments of the cities of San Francisco and New York" and was created "with the guidance and encouragement of the White House." Yelp's specification page dates the partnership to 2012. The same day, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee announced the city's partnership with Yelp, and SFist reported he would present it at the Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C.
Code for America ran the adoption side through its Peer Network. Its 2013 LIVES page described LIVES as "an open data standard which allows municipalities to publish restaurant inspection information to Yelp or any other website" and asked cities to "pledge to implement the LIVES standard in your municipality." That page is what this domain displayed in 2013 and 2014. A later version of Code for America's page credited the City and County of San Francisco, the City of New York and Yelp with developing the specification.
The format, file by file
The current specification is version 2.0. Yelp's page states it "was last updated on August 10, 2015" and that "LIVES requires that data be presented in several CSV files consolidated in a single ZIP file." Three files are required and two are optional.
| File | Status | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
businesses.csv | Required | One row per establishment: business_id, name, address, city, state (required); postal_code, latitude, longitude, phone_number (optional). |
inspections.csv | Required | One row per inspection: business_id and date (YYYYMMDD) required; score, result, description, type optional. |
feed_info.csv | Required | A single row describing the feed: feed_date, feed_version, municipality_name, municipality_url, contact_email. |
violations.csv | Optional | One row per violation: business_id, date, description, code, critical. |
legend.csv | Optional | Score ranges and their meaning: minimum_score, maximum_score, description. |
Details that matter when you read a LIVES feed
- business_id is the join key across files. The specification notes: "For many cities, this may be the license number."
- score is defined as "Inspection score on a 0-100 scale. 100 is the highest score." A city whose own system counts points upward (New York, where lower is better) has to translate to publish a LIVES score.
- result is a short string: "The string must be 4 characters or fewer. Examples: 'Pass' or 'Fail'."
- type "Must be one of: initial, routine, followup, complaint."
- violations.csv:
descriptionhas a 200 character maximum; forcode, "It is recommended that this be based on the FDA Food Code" with an 11 character maximum;criticalmust be true or false. - legend.csv is how a city explains its own scale. The ranges "must cover the entire 0-100 span without overlap," and the specification's own example: "if 80-90 is a 'B' and 90-100 is an 'A', a score of 90 would be an 'A'."
- Coordinates are WGS 84 latitude and longitude.
To join, a jurisdiction hosts the ZIP on its own web server for Yelp to fetch and emails [email protected] with a link to a sample feed, per the same page.
The legend file is the part of LIVES that admits the core problem: a common file format does not make scores comparable. Each city still defines what its numbers mean. Our guide to why inspection scores do not compare between cities covers that in detail.
Who adopted it
- 2013: San Francisco and New York City were the launch jurisdictions; Yelp wrote that consumers in both would be first "as it rolls out in the weeks ahead" (Yelp). The Code for America pledge page's list of cities, in a May 2013 capture, shows one entry: City & County of San Francisco.
- October 2013: Accela announced it had partnered "with Code for America to set specifications associated with LIVES restaurant inspection data" for its CivicData.com service (GISuser).
- April 2014: Food Safety News reported that Yelp had incorporated scores from San Francisco, Los Angeles County, New York City, Louisville, KY, and Wake County (Raleigh), NC (Food Safety News).
- October 2014: Evanston, IL scores appeared on Yelp (Eater Chicago).
- Montgomery County, MD published a dataset described as "Current food Inspection dataset published using LIVES data standard." Its portal entry was last updated March 1, 2017.
Where LIVES stands in 2026
On March 31, 2022, Yelp announced that Hazel Analytics, a company that collects inspection records from health departments, "now powers the hygiene data on nearly 700,000 Yelp pages." An update note on the same post says Hazel Analytics was acquired by Ecolab and rebranded Health Department Intelligence (HDI), and that Yelp now publishes inspection data from HDI. Yelp's health and safety data page describes the two routes: partnerships with local governments, and third-party partners that collect public data from health departments.
Yelp's public feed list shows the balance. On September 17, 2026 we counted 247 rows. 237 of them list HDI or Hazel as the source. 10 are jurisdictions publishing their own LIVES feed:
| Jurisdiction |
|---|
| Boulder County Public Health (CO) |
| Contra Costa County (CA) |
| County of Marin (CA) |
| Fort Worth (TX) |
| Lewisville (TX) |
| Los Angeles County (CA) |
| San Bernardino County (CA) |
| Wake County (NC) |
| Weld County (CO) |
| Williamson County (TX) |
San Francisco, New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia appear on that list only as rows sourced from Hazel. The first two are the standard's co-authors.
San Francisco went further. Its open-data entry for Health Inspection Scores (2016-2019) now opens with: "As of 2021, the LIVES standard is no longer being used to evaluate restaurants. For that reason, this dataset is no longer being updated but will remain on the open data portal." What replaced the score is covered in What happened to San Francisco's restaurant scores. Code for America's LIVES page, the destination this domain once redirected to, now returns an error.
So the format still exists and is still documented, a handful of health departments still publish in it, and a restaurant's inspections still reach Yelp in most places. They mostly travel through an aggregator rather than through a feed each city publishes itself.
Sources
- Yelp: Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification (LIVES), version 2.0
- Yelp: health score feed list
- Yelp blog: Now on Yelp: Restaurant Inspection Scores (January 17, 2013)
- Yelp blog: Yelp partners with Hazel Analytics (March 31, 2022)
- Code for America Peer Network LIVES page, archived May 2013; Code for America LIVES data format page, archived May 2015
- DataSF: Health Inspection Scores (2016-2019)