WIVB Launches Restaurant Inspections Database Powered by Caspio

WIVB News4, the local news leader in Buffalo, New York, is bringing health code offenders into the public eye for the first time with the help of Caspio.

Yesterday WIVB published a restaurant inspections database for Erie County (the largest county in the Buffalo area) along with seven other adjacent counties in Western New York. So far, the database has attracted over half a million page views within the first day of running the story, and traffic is still growing. The database performance has been stellar without any issues.

For the first time ever, Erie county citizens can see the health code information for all the restaurants in their community. It so happens that Erie is the only county in New York that doesn’t participate in the statewide database or have their own county database. As a result, the public didn’t have access to health inspection data for Erie County and the 3,000 restaurants that operate there. Prior to this project, the only way for citizens to obtain this information was filing a formal Freedom of Information request. WIVB filed their own FOIA request and obtained the data from the New York State Health Department. WIVB then created a user-friendly searchable database using Caspio, simultaneously serving their readers and positioning themselves as the only website with the information readily available to the public.

Now with the database up and running on the WIVB website, the public can search the health inspection data by county, city/town, restaurant name, or number of violations. Below is the user interface for Erie County.

WIVB also created a mobile-friendly version where users can search the data via their smart phones or tablets.

Read the full story and search the database.

If you have a similar project, or are interested in creating web and mobile apps to search data online, sign up for a free trial account or request a no-obligation consultation session with a Caspio expert.