Yelp suggests its open data project could help end food poisoning | VentureBeat | Science | by Harrison Weber

"Yelp’s open data project has shamed some restaurants into cleaning up their act, the company claims in a new blog post. Yelp began publishing restaurant health inspection scores over two years ago, first in partnership with the City of San Francisco. At the time, Yelp said its data sharing project won’t 'necessarily provide a direct contribution to Yelp’s bottom line, but evidence suggests [that the] open data standard will have a positive impact on society.' So, what impact has it made thus far? We don’t have data on the number of restaurant-goers offended and deterred by sub-par scores — we suspect Yelp isn’t interested in tracking that. But a study by Harvard Business School (HBS) suggests that publishing inspection scores on Yelp actually pressured many businesses to improve their scores in subsequent inspections. HBS apparently found the correlation after notifying a selection of restaurants that their scores will be published on Yelp ..."