Chapter 1 Introduction

We have Three goals for this project. Provide people with easy access to visualizaed restaurant information; map the restaurant onto NYC map for geographical distribution; explore any interesting relationship between restaurant reviews and health inspection data.

Our project uses two restaurant datasets we scraped. One is from Opentable, another one is the inspection data from the Health Department. First, we want to provide an interacitve user interface such that people can easily get a through information of a restaurant, including its detailed reviews and how the restaurant performed during the inspections. Second, we want to see the geographical distribution of the restaurants by inspection results. By mapping the restaurants into the NYC map, we can identify which neighborhood have the cleanest restaurants and which neighborhood has not so clean restaurants. It is also more convenient for people who just want to focus on their on neighborhoods. Finally, we want to investigate the overall relationship between restaurants’ public reviews and the performance during the inspection. We would like to know if popular restaurants generally meet the health requirements. Besides that we would also like to see if there is any unexpected trend. For example, is there any very poorly reviewed restaurant that got exceptionally good reviews during inspections?