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?

There are multiple ways to integrate Open Reviews into your project:

• REST API Integration: Interact directly with the reviewer API, which stores and retrieves reviews from the open dataset. The signer and the Fediverse bridge have their own OpenAPI documents.
• Client Libraries: The JS library mangrove-reviews reads and writes reviews with a key the app holds or through the signer login, binds identities, and gives the Fediverse account to follow. The Rust crate mangrove-reviews has the review types and validation, the key encodings, and the did:plc operations, for servers and tools that implement the standard themselves.
• Web Widget: Make use of our web widget by pasting in an HTML snippet on your site. It will allow your users to read and write Open Reviews, while the customisation tools give you control over what and how things are displayed.
• Mobile Design Example: Download PDF showing a complete mobile app interface design that demonstrates how Open Reviews can be integrated into mobile applications.
• Fediverse Following: Let your users follow a reviewer or a place from Mastodon. Two requests give your app the account handle and a follow link; new reviews then reach followers as posts.
• Sign In to Review: Let 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 reviews on their behalf; three requests give your app a session, a signed review, and a submission.
• Reviewer Identities: Give reviewers one identity across keys, devices and apps with a Decentralized Identifier. A signed claim binds a key to the identity; a Bluesky account can bind its own DID.

For apps built on Mangrove — user-facing and integrator tools — see the ecosystem.

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.

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