Ontology of the Listing of Active Businesses
The ontology of the Listing of Active Businesses lists all active businesses that are currently registered with the Office of Finance. This list is updated monthly and is organized into categories. It consists of the location account number, business name, dba name, address (street, city, zip code), mailing address, location description, NAICS and its description, council district, location start and end date, along with the location’s coordinates.
Usefulness
This listing would be useful for businesses, real estate, or corporations who would need the location number to determine whether or not a spot is available for purchase. Additionally, corporations are able to scout on what type of businesses are around the area that they are looking at. For example, with the listings, if a business wanted to open a storage unit, they are able to see where all the storage units are located. From there, they can determine which placement would be best for their business. Also, the government can use this data due to the NAICS code. With this code, the federal agency is able to collect, organize, and publish statistical data within the U.S. economy. Because of this, I don’t think that it is practical for daily use and can only be used for business owners, real estates, and corporations.
What the listing is missing.
In this listing, to make it more practical for the daily use, having store hours, pictures, links to directions, and descriptions of the business would be useful. Because this listing is focused primarily on location, they left any information including description out. Having a description is vital for businesses because even though the categories contains the name of the business, the name does not always indicate what is being sold or offered at the business.
Restarting the data-collection
If I were to start this data again, I would have small descriptions for every business. Additionally, I would include pictures of the business so that people can “see” the business before they actually go there and see what is actually offered, business hours, and reviews. In order to make this a more useful data set, the format would be very similar to Yelp. Yelp gives viewers an insight into how a business is before they actually attend, and with this set, we would be able to configure it to do the same thing.