Medical marijuana collective is an ontology of active businesses selling medical marijuana in Los Angeles. The data is categorized into 16 different sections. These categories have more to do with their location than anything else. The creator of this ontology start off with the Location Account continued by Business Name, DBA (Doing Business As), Street Address, City and continues with other location based information.
I believe this ontology benefit several groups of people including parents, medical marijuana users and recreational users. Parents have the most to gain from this set of information and the creator was more than likely keeping them in mind. With this ontology parents can see where marijuana is being sold. Why is this important? This data helps parents keep their children away from it. They can ask themselves is this stuff near a public park, a school, the grocery store, how close is this to my home? Medical Marijuana users are 1B as far as beneficiaries goes. Users can easily locate a business that provides them with their medicine. Recreational users benefit as well. With recent legislation one simply needs to be 21+ and they can buy marijuana from medical dispensary. This is without a doubt a useful ontology for a wide ranging group of people.
The ontology is labeled underneath A Prosperous City and I believe this dataset promotes exactly that. As I mentioned before this information provides parents with a useful tool that enables them to protect their children from “drugs”, promoting security and safety. Medical users are able to locate where they can retrieve their prescribed medication, along the way promoting health. Providing readers with the location of these business does exactly what it claims to do, push for A Prosperous City.
The database has just about every piece of useful information when locating a business, but what it is missing is a phone number in which someone can contact the business. The database has everything from mailing address, street address as well as latitude and longitude.
If I would start over with the data-collection, describing the ontology from a different perspective I would elect to do so from that of a researchers’. A researcher could use this information for number of reasons including finding the benefits or harmful effects of marijuana by locating those who use it, researching crime as it relates to the location of marijuana being sold.
I really like your idea of describing the data set for the benefit of researchers. I think it would be very interesting to see how the use of marijuana correlates to aspects like crime, as you mentioned. Other areas like education, neighborhood, etc. can also be interesting to analyze and see how these variables correlate.
I think it’d be interesting as well to include perhaps the median or average income and age of the demographic that lives in the neighborhoods of the dispensaries. This could perhaps then provide a fuller picture as to the reach of the dispensaries. And with the recent legislation legalizing marijuana, the date of establishment for these dispensaries could be helpful too for further analysis.
the two groups of people that you stated would benefit from this data set is so accurate. i could definitely imagine parents using this collection of data to help decide where they wanted to buy a home before starting a family.
I like the knowledge you included about marijuana purchasing legislation. I do believe that the intent of this data set extends beyond parents, however I do agree that parents certainly can find this information useful. I would argue that it is not the city’s data collectors job to include contact information for the marijuana dispensaries. That to me is a bit of a governmental overreach and one which doesn’t respect the privacy of dispensary owners. I believe that ample information was provided for viewers of this data set to acquire contact information if needed however. A mailing address to me is the extent of communication information I would deem borderline appropriate to include in this data set.