For this week, I’ll be exploring the dataset titled: Listing of Active Businesses. This is a list of all active businesses that are registered with the Office of Finance. To be clear, they defined “active” as registered business whose owners have not asked for a cease of business operations. This data set is updated monthly.
The content models included are: Location Account #, Business name, DBA Name (Doing Business As), Street Address, City, Zip Code, Location Description, Mailing Address, Mailing City, Mailing Zip Code, NAICS code (North American Industry classification System), Primary NAICS Description, Council District, Location Start Date, Location End Date, and Location.
I think this dataset does a great job describing the business in numerous ways. If you are most familiar with address/city/zip code, you can find businesses that way. If you are most familiar with geographic location based on latitude and longitude, you can also find the business that way. People who are looking for certain businesses in the neighborhood would benefit a lot from this extensive list. In addition, I found myself going to the “location” tab and looking down that column to see what businesses were near me. Using the search bar in the top right corner is also extremely beneficial to users because they can narrow down what they want to see in a quick and efficient way.
This dataset is telling us about all the active businesses, and it claims to describe all businesses in a single list. I noticed that some columns are not as easy to understand by purely looking at this list. For example, the council district. I know LA’s council district is divided into 15 areas; however, I would not know right off the bat that council district 1 is the area “Northeast Los Angeles and Northwest Los Angeles.” Additional research would be needed to fully understand that column- which is not ideal for users.
If I were to start over with this data collection, I would include more practical information. I would definitely include most of these columns inside my own, especially because business name, address (street/city/zip code), and location are important to know. I would also include more columns like the Primary NAICS Description (that tells you what kind of business it is). Possibly adding links to websites like Yelp, or even the business home page links would be helpful. It would give people all the information and necessary links in one spreadsheet.