Ontology Summary
This listing of active businesses in LA is organized by location account number, business name, doing as business name, address, general location, and council district. This ontology makes the most sense from the perspective of a city planner or city council member. It allows the user to manipulate the data from a business name or geographic perspective both of which are useful in city planning or when creating public policy.
What does this dataset indicate
Looking at this dataset, it is clear that it is used for bureaucratic functionalities since there are very few descriptors relating to the actual business purpose other than a short description of the business. Even this short description of the business uses a standardized categorization system. It focuses on bureaucratic efficiency by standardizing all of its values in one way or another. Additionally, other than its geographic and political identity, it suggests that this dataset is not meant to provide a more three dimensional perspective of the business itself .
What this dataset is missing
I would argue that this dataset is missing the human element of a business. There is nothing about the owners, types of products or services sold, or health of the business. However, its metadata could be revealing of the success or nature of the business since it does indicate the duration of the business. This idea may be a bit flawed since there are the cases of partnerships where whenever a new partner enters the partnership, the previous partnership dissolves and a new partnership gets formed which does not accurately reflect how long a business as a provider of goods or services has existed.
How this dataset could be improved
This is a difficult for the primary reason that datasets such as this is meant for bureaucratic functionalities, not digital humanities which have very different objectives. Bureaucratic goals include regulation and taxation in which depending on the regulation and taxation policies, a data such as this would suffice. Digital humanities, however, have an objective of contextualizing data that reveals more about the circumstances of the data itself. I believe to help bureaucracy to be more holistic, it would be useful to understand consumer reaction to the businesses to get an idea of how does this business provide value to a community.
Hi, I like your point on that its main purpose would have been for bureaucratic procedures. Also, I agree with you on that it lacks a lot of information that could provide resourceful narrative, especially when approached with humanities perspective. However, I still think it is convenient reservoir of information to look up the approximate number of businesses, which could be helpful for business people who are trying to open up a new branch, or investors who would like to feel the most famous and resourceful business to support. Also, I think even consumers would enjoy this data, since they can easily experiment and try out the individual businesses within a similar category.
I analyzed this data set as well and I completely didn’t even consider ‘humanizing’ the data more. Great point on how the duration of the business location may indicate relative success, but leaves more to be desired. How do you think these changes would shift the demographic of the people using the set?
Hello! I also analyzed this dataset about active businesses registered in Los Angeles. I liked the way you organized the blog post so that it clearly answered each question, and also how you approached it with more of a bureaucratic vs humanistic filter. I think that, while my blog post focused on certain aspects that were missing such as the size of a business, or the reasons for why a business would close down, you characterized it well by saying that the dataset is missing a more holistic perspective by disregarding the reaction of a community to a business. These are definitely important traits to consider when evaluating the diverse impact of businesses on people in a neighborhood (cultural, economic, political, etc.) and would help make the dataset less focused on sheer numbers and statistics. Overall, good job!
Hi,
I did my blog post on this topic as well. I really enjoyed how you organized your post; it made it really easy to understand what you were trying to say. I agree that the data listing was straightforward and left out the human element of the business. It is hard to determine what is sold and who runs the business. Overall, great post! I really enjoyed reading it.
Great post! I definitely agree that some amount of information regarding the success of the business can be figured out through things such as the duration of the company, even though no quantity or data is presented that communicates success or failure directly (such as amount of bankruptcy filed). But even then like you said, finding ways such as studying duration isn’t entirely flawless or wholesome.
I love your post! You organized your blogpost in a way that it’s clear that you answered every question. I like you pointed out that there’s a standardized categorization system for business because that really helps the data user to extract desired information more at ease. I agree with you that by adding more information about the consumer, the dataset could have been more useful to both policy analysts and business owners.
Hi,
I agreed that the dataset mainly serves for bureaucratic functionalities which resulted in the large amount of limitations of which kind of data should be included or not. An outsider’s opinion such as from the consumers will definitely enrich the depth of this dataset.