The data is obtained from the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH).

The data is obtained on a weekly basis. Data is made available every Wednesday covering the prior week and EveryBlock publishes the new data on the same day. The DPH also maintains a public database of restaurant violations and scores that is updated on the same schedule but containing less data (locations, scores, and violations) than is available on EveryBlock.

Due to this data refresh schedule, and the reinspection schedule of the DPH, it is possible that a restaurant may have passed a reinspection and corrected all violations without a record of those corrections here on EveryBlock. Also, since EveryBlock is interested in what happens on a given day, the record for any given inspection may change. For instance, if a restaurant is inspected on the first of the month and found to have a number of violations, that is what we will report when we get that data. Three weeks later, the same location may be reinspected and found to have all of the violations corrected. In this instance, the initial record of inspection will remain in our system, subject to search, but we will update that record to include a link to the reinspection result. The best way to get a complete history of a particular location is to visit the DPH page for that location. A link to that record is provided on the inspection detail page here on EveryBlock. Keep in mind that the DPH database is updated on the same schedule as EveryBlock.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health conducts regular inspections under its food safety program.

Go to the SDPH Web site for more information on their Food Safety Program.