I am currently working on a Capstone project at General Assembly. Under the guidance of Carey Anne Nadeau from Open Data Nation, I am working to replicate Chicago’s Food Inspection Forecasting open source project for Washington, DC. I am also doing this in Python instead of R.

Open Data Nation was the first entity to replicate Chicago’s model and is actively working to replicate the project for additional cities through FIVAR.

So far it has definitely been interesting! I am still cleaning and wrangling my data. My goal is to model the data in the first days of July. In addition to data available on the District of Columbia Open Data Portal, I have pulled data from multiple APIs including Google Places, Yelp, SeeClickFix, and Forecast.io. DC’s Health Inspection Reports are available online, but do not have an API available. I downloaded my target reports locally and parsed them with Beautiful Soup. I also took this opportunity to try mongoDB. I used it to house some of my API records.

Check back in August for more information!