Who gets to decide what counts as an active business?

I choose to explore the “Listing of Active Businesses” dataset. The dataset consists of 16 content types, including, business name, street address, city, zip code, location, and description. All of the content types were straight forward, accept “Location account #” since I was unfamiliar with this term. If I was going to be using this dataset for my project, this is something I would have to research. I imagine this information would be clear to someone who works with businesses or keeps track of them. There are 495,904 records that correspond to the different businesses in L.A.. Based on these straightforward content types, the content model is practical, user friendly and easy to understand and organize. Contrasty, my group’s dataset needs a lot of data cleaning to get to the point that this dataset looks like. The dataset seems to be from the point of view of the city of Los Angeles. In other words, someone who works for the city created this dataset to make it easy to locate and track down the various businesses in Los Angeles. It could also be from the point of view of Los Angeles businesses owners as they might find this dataset helpful in deciding where to open their business or expand their business in comparison to the locations of other businesses. While this dataset claims to describe the phenomenon of the different businesses in Los Angles that are currently active, it gives little information on what these businesses actually do. While we are given the title of each businesses, we are not given any information about what their purpose is. This makes the dataset ambiguous because it leaves it up to the audience to assume what the businesses does based off of its name. The dataset also begs the question of who gets to decide what counts as an active business in Los Angeles. Is this based on how much revenue they generate? Or perhaps it requires businesses owners to fill out forms to get a business permit. Of course, there are businesses owners who are not aware of this protocol or who don’t meet the requirements. Thus, this means that many businesses are left out that haven’t met these guidelines. For instance, when I am on my way home from work I always pass by a man selling roses on the street. Yet, it is unlikely that his business is listed in this dataset. If I were to start the dataset over, I would include unofficial businesses in Los Angeles to better represent the population. For instance, I would include the man who sells roses in between cars as well as the people who sell fruit in Westwood. I might also include pictures as one of my content types to document the business in Los Angeles in a different way in order to create a stronger historical narrative.