For this blog post, I decided to investigate the Payroll by Department dataset from the L.A. Controller\u2019s Office website. This is payroll information for all the City Departments of Los Angeles since 2013 which is updated on a quarterly basis. The data types used for this dataset are Department title, Year, Job class, Projected Annual Salary, quarterly payment, payments over base pay, percent over base pay and total payments. A record in this dataset refers to above mentioned payroll information specific to one of the 56 departments included in the dataset.<\/p>\n
Wallack and Srinivasan\u00a0define ontology as \u201csystems of categories and their interrelations by which groups order and manage information about the people, places, things, and events around them.\u201d Based on this information we can see that this dataset\u2019s ontology looks at how total payments differs across different departments and how that is broken down into specific categories such as quarters and payments over base pay. The people that will find this information the most illuminating are individuals interested in how much money in total is used to pay employees for each department in the city of Los Angeles. For example, those who are in charge of the city budget would find this categorization of data very useful. Other individuals that might be interested are those who are trying to compare the difference in pay for different departments across different cities within California or the US.<\/p>\n
This dataset does a good job of giving total numbers for the money that goes into paying a city department. For example, when you click on the pie chart, the information you immediately get the department name and the total payments for that department. However, these records don\u2019t let you get into the specifics or even tell you how many payments are totaled in the calculation. For example, the LAPD section shows a total payment of $1,344,118,166.75 but we have no sense of how that number breaks down into a payment for an individual officer.<\/p>\n
While this ontology might be very useful for budget planning, it isn\u2019t as useful for those trying to get a sense of what the average total payment per person is in each department. These would be people potentially interested in working for the city and wanting to compare average salaries from different departments. This kind of ontology would include data types such as average projected annual salary, average quarterly payments, and average payment over base pay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For this blog post, I decided to investigate the Payroll by Department dataset from the L.A. Controller\u2019s Office website. This is payroll information for all the City Departments of Los … Continue reading “Payroll by Department Dataset”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}