Miami Restaurant Inspection Database methodology
How District 1 restaurant inspection records are normalized and ranked.
Inputs and coverage
The source is the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation District 1 food-inspection extract. We normalize the extract’s license identifier, establishment name, address, city, postal code, inspection date, inspection type, disposition, and violation counts. Field aliases are explicit because public extracts sometimes change capitalization or punctuation. Undeclared columns are not silently published.
Inspection method
Outcome labels are mapped into consistent pass, follow-up, closure, warning, or other categories based on the official disposition text. The severity score gives greater weight to reported critical violations than noncritical violations, and fixed thresholds convert that score into low, moderate, high, or severe bands. The score is a VUGA navigation aid, not an official DBPR rating.
Limitations
An inspection is a dated observation and does not describe current conditions indefinitely. Counts and dispositions may be corrected, appealed, or followed by later inspections. Establishments can change names or operators while retaining or changing license identifiers. Readers should consult the state record for official status and should not infer foodborne illness, intent, or overall quality from a single inspection.
Update schedule
The extract is checked weekly. A complete file must pass required-field and row-count continuity checks before its staging snapshot can be promoted. Public pages cover no more than five thousand significant records, prioritizing recent inspections and higher reported violation counts. Earlier and lower-ranked normalized records remain retained in MongoDB.