Duarte described an ontology as an organizational strategy that divides information into data and reflects the categories that the data is sorted in to. However, ontologies are also highly personal and reflect primarily the opinions or worldview of the person who organize them. The Listing of Active Businesses data set has a very simplistic and intuitive ontology. It categorizes almost 500,000 businesses in Los Angeles that are currently registered with the Office of Finance in terms of name of the business, address, city, zip code, location description, description of purpose, mailing city/zip code/address, location start date/end date, and geographical coordinates. This method of data creation seems highly categorical and inventory-like – it gives the bare-bones details of each business. Because of this, it seems to have originated from a city planner or developers’ standpoint, or perhaps the information is simply stored as records kept on file as inventory. They do not seem of be of use to the general public because it describes pretty mundane information whose relevant information (address, purpose, etc.) could probably be found more intuitively and easily by doing a simple Google search. The dataset doesn’t provide much information other than the basic facts regarding these businesses – even the descriptions of the services don’t tell us much, because they are just categories (educational services, real estate leasers, warehouses). We lack insight regarding type of school, contents of said warehouse, etc. Therefore, quite a bit about the businesses themselves is left out, including size of the business, age, and employee information, among other potentially relevant details.
If I were to start over with data collection and describe a completely different ontology from someone else’s point of view, I would categorize the data in a way that is more usable and relevant to the average user. For example, I would include a short description of the services/goods offered, information such as operating hours and manager contact information, phone numbers, etc. so that these businesses can be reached. I would leave out the not-so-relevant details like geographical coordinates and instead focus on gathering other relevant, usable information that allows users to gain a better feel for what businesses are in LA and how they can best utilize the ones they need.