The City of L.A.’s listing of active businesses is a data set that contains (obviously) a listing of all active businesses in the city of Los Angeles. The ontology of the data is primarily geographical, with most categories pertaining to location/address, including an oddly specific longitude and latitude coordinates division.
Though this data seems useful for the white pages or general maps, it’s most likely for the benefit of location based apps like Yelp, Google Maps, and even Postmates. With more and more phone applications being used to identify local businesses that suit your need (whether it be food, shopping, etc.), a city-wide database could facilitate more efficient client-database interactions as well as preventing discrepancies between different data sources.
This data set claims to be a “Listing of all active businesses currently registered with the Office of Finance. An ‘active’ business is defined as a registered business whose owner has not notified the Office of Finance of a cease of business operations.” While this definition is pretty general, the data does do a good job of doing what it claims to do. Aside from all of the geographical details, the set also informs users of the business’ start date as well as a brief description of the business itself.
Despite this wealth of information, I would like to see a more general approach to the business description. Instead of “Limited-Service eating places” for example, the general term of “Food & Drink” could be used. This would ensure that despite less specificity in terms of the data description, the set could be divided into much simpler chunks.
If it was up to me to rework this data set, I would use an ontology that is more service-based instead of location-based. Though my assumption that this set is more app-targeted could be incorrect, I believe that what something is can often be more informative than where. Obviously addresses are important, but a heavier emphasis on services and general context for the business itself would provide users with a more informative interaction.
Hi!
I also wrote my blog post about this dataset. I agree when you said that the information is most useful to those who want to learn about location, but great point that it would benefit location based apps, too. I also thought it was interesting that you wanted to see a more general approach to the business description because I argued in my post that more specific descriptions would be more helpful to the general public in a new dataset. I do see the use in general descriptions for dividing the dataset into simpler chunks. Great work!