Open Data Initiatives

Environmental Health is providing access through the City's data portal, DataSF, to diverse city data to help visualize complex changes in the social, economic and physical environments most important to health and land use. The goal of the open data initiative is to make our community more informed, connected, and to support citizen engagement with government.

Increasing access to data helps the City explore new solutions, improve government efficiency and support civic engagement. It also allows the private sector to creatively apply open data to technological innovations that improve the quality of life. Environmental Health is committed to making data on city and government performance publicly available and is currently working on several projects to meet this goal.

Environmental Health Regulatory Data

Environmental Health is responsible for many of the City's public health and environmental quality regulations. The public can look up and view results of inspections for individual restaurants, apartments, and hotels at www.sfenvironmentalhealth.org. Environmental Health has collaborated with New York City and YELP® to develop a national standard and protocol for sharing restaurant inspection data. For more information on the national data standard and how to share restaurant inspection data with any website, click here. Public data on apartment inspections will be available in a similar standardized format in 2013.

Sustainable Communities Index (SCI) Indicators

The SCI is a comprehensive system of over 100 performance indicators for a livable, equitable and prosperous city. The scope of the SCI includes Environmental Quality, Transportation, Community, Public Realm, Education, Housing, and Economy. Data for the SCI were gathered from the best sources available for each indicator, which included other departments within the City and County of San Francisco, federal agencies and a variety of other public and private agencies and organizations. For more information on the SCI measures and methodologies, visit www.sustainablesf.org.

Transportation Safety Data

The Pedestrian Safety Geodatabase combines environmental, social, and demographic data from multiple data sources and is being used to analyze factors associated with the distribution of pedestrian injury and injury severity. The high injury corridors map—which identifies the roads with the greatest density of severe and fatal pedestrian collisions--now informs citywide enforcement and engineering investments.