King County Restaurant Inspection Fix

My investigations led to fixing an error in the publication of King County restaurant data.

I spoke with Hilary Karasz — her tech guy, Mark, fixed the error in the publication of their data.They are once again publishing violation information on their site.It also appears that they have gone back and re-published to records during the time period where violation data was missing.I think that the fix now on our end is to rescrape back to November 1 or so.

Some links for fact-checking:

* Here’s the TAQUERIA EL MAGUEY record that sparked our inquiry: http://www.decadeonline.com/insp.phtml?agency=skc&forceresults=1&record_id=PR0077496* It now has violation data in there– wasn’t there before, as reflected by our record of the inspection: http://seattle.everyblock.com/restaurant-inspections/by-date/2008/12/31/588057/* They fixed the system, and our scraper picked up the fix, as seen in this link from an inspection this week: http://seattle.everyblock.com/restaurant-inspections/by-date/2009/1/5/592332/

More backup info, below, but if we point our taser to the past, we should heal ourselves.

Yay!

———- Forwarded message ———-From: Daniel X. O’Neil <danx@everyblock.com>Date: Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 1:09 PMSubject: EveryBlock Seattle and Restaurant Inspection DataTo: James Apa <james.apa@kingcounty.gov>, Matias Valenzuela <matias.valenzuela@kingcounty.gov>, Hilary Karasz <hilary.karasz@kingcounty.gov>

Hi all.My name is Dan O’Neil, and I’m working on a project called EveryBlock, a new Web site that pulls together local news and public information. The site gives the public easy ways of finding news and information that is geographically relevant to them. We’ve launched in five cities — Charlotte, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. I include links to more information about us below.I’m contacting your office because we’re working on a Seattle version of the site, and I’d like to get a feed of the data that King County presents via this Web-based lookup system: http://www.decadeonline.com/main.phtml?agency=skc. This is a great tool for the public, but we’re looking for a sustainable way to query the system (or get a report out of the system) that will give us only “New inspections” on a daily basis. Here are some examples from existing EveryBlock cities and the methods we use to obtain the data in each example:

Charlotte Restaurant inspections (http://charlotte.everyblock.com/restaurant-inspections/): we obtain this information on a nightly basis via a direct data feed
Chicago Restaurant inspections (http://chicago.everyblock.com/restaurant-inspections/): we obtain this data via a direct query to the City’s Web-based system (http://webapps.cityofchicago.org/health/inspection.jsp)
New York City Restaurant inspections (http://nyc.everyblock.com/restaurant-inspections/): we obtain this data via a direct query to the City’s Web-based system (http://home2.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/rii/index.shtml)
Philadelphia Restaurant inspections (http://philly.everyblock.com/restaurant-inspections/)
San Francisco Building permits (http://sf.everyblock.com/restaurant-inspections/): we obtain this data via a database dump placed on an FTP site on a regular basis by the San Francisco Department of Health

As you can see, we can work with whatever format you have and pretty much any retrieval method that makes sense for you. If it is better for you that we obtain the records from the public system, that works for us. Let me know what you think — we’re looking forward to working with you!–Daniel X. O’Neil