Getting into the flow, surfing restaurant inspections with GeoFlow and Microsoft Data Explorer (Think "Web Data + Excel + 3D = Good Food")

Microsoft Business Intelligence - Surfing Restaurant Inspections with Microsoft Data Explorer and GeoFlow

Father’s Day is approaching and you might be thinking about a good place to have a nice lunch with your Dad… We would like to show you how Data Explorer and Geoflow can help you gather some insights to make a good decision.

In order to achieve this, we will look at publicly available data about Food Establishment Inspections for the past 7 years and we will also leverage the Yelp API to bring ratings and reviews for restaurants. For the purpose of this post, we will focus on the King County area (WA) but you can try to find local data about Food Establishment inspections for your area too.

What you will need:

• Data Explorer.
• Geoflow.
  • Access to the following data:
  • Food Establishment Inspections data from datakc.org (more details):
  • We will link to this URL (which points to the CSV file version of the data) using Data Explorer: https://www.datakc.org/api/views/pph9-v8tz/rows.csv?accessType=DOWNLOAD
  • Yelp API (more details):
  • You will need to sign up for an API key before being able to connect. Please also make sure to read the Yelp API Terms of Use before using this API.

What you will learn in this post:

• Import data from the Yelp Web API (JSON) using Data Explorer.
• Import public data about Food Establishment Inspections from a CSV file.
• Reshape the data in your queries.
• Parameterize the Yelp query by turning it into a function, using the Data Explorer formula language, so you can reuse it to retrieve information about different types of restaurants as well as different geographical locations.
• Invoke a function given a set of user-defined inputs in an Excel table.
• Combine (Merge) two queries.
• Load the final query into the Data Model.
• Visualize the results in Geoflow.

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You know you want to play with this... Just admit it. Makes me want to install Office 2013 just so I can...  :)

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Going with the GeoFlow for Excel 2013... Free 3D visualization add-in for mapping, exploring, and interacting with geographical/temporal data