Technology

Open Reviews Association maintains Mangrove, the open-source infrastructure behind the dataset. Detailed developer documentation and the Mangrove Review Standard live with the Mangrove project at mangrove.reviews and its sub-domains.

All implemented components are available under Apache License 2.0 and you can inspect or contribute to their code.

How can I integrate Open Reviews into my website or app?

• Web Widget

  Paste an HTML snippet into your site, and your users can read and write reviews there. Attributes control what the widget shows and how.

• Browser Extension

  Your users review the website, place or book in their current tab. The reviewed site needs no snippet.

• Sign In to Review

  Your users log in with a passkey, OpenStreetMap or Bluesky and write reviews without managing keys. The signer holds a key per person and signs on their behalf.

• Reviewer Identities

  A Decentralized Identifier gives a reviewer one identity across keys, devices and apps. A Bluesky account can bind its own DID.

• Fediverse Following

  Your users follow a reviewer or a place from Mastodon, and new reviews reach them as posts. Two requests give your app the handle and a follow link.

• Client Libraries

  The JS library reads and writes reviews with an app key or through the signer, binds identities, and finds the Fediverse account to follow. The Rust crate has the review types, validation and key encodings for servers and tools.

• REST API

  The reviewer API stores and retrieves reviews. The signer and the Fediverse bridge have their own OpenAPI documents, and the JWT Inspector checks a request body before you submit it.

• Mobile Design Example

  A PDF of a complete mobile app interface with Open Reviews built in.

The ecosystem lists the apps and tools built on Mangrove.

How does it work?

• Technical standard including the data format to ensure interoperability and allow for reviews to be analyzed programmatically.
• Implementations including the server and all components which rely on it.
• Open-source probabilistic aggregation algorithm to ensure reliability of the data.
• Every review is stored in an Open Dataset licensed under CC-BY-4.0. You can download and make use of the dataset freely, as long as you agree to protect user privacy and copyright laws. Anyone can also host a copy and keep it in sync, see Open Data.

Principles

For the Open Reviews Ecosystem to succeed and the infrastructure to be maintainable by the community, we believe the underlying technology has to ensure three main qualities:

• The data format has to be useful for as many parties as possible, so that the dataset is valuable and attractive to use.
  • Capture as many aspects as necessary for different use cases
  • Open and free-of-charge access
• The infrastructure needs to be easy to integrate into websites and apps for reading and writing reviews, so that the ecosystem gains integrators and the dataset grows.
  • Clear technical standard that ensures interoperability
  • Easy-to-use and well-documented APIs
  • Clear legal framework to provide confidence in the integration
• The infrastructure needs to be easy to maintain at low cost and little overhead.
  • Reliable and persistent database server
  • Open source development to allow for redundancy and open innovation
  • Effective governance structures to ensure the infrastructure can evolve as the needs of the ecosystem participants change