Week 4 blog post

The dataset titled ‘Listing of Active Businesses’ utilizes a name and location-based an ontology to categorize its information. The content types of this table include “Locations Account #”, “Business Name”, “DBA Name”, “Street Address”, “City”, “Zip Code”, “Business Description”, “Location Start Date”, and “Location End Date”. Based on its ontological structure, this table may be useful  a number of different kinds of bureaucrats including to tax collectors, government permit regulators, lawyers, or individuals looking to track down the business by name to send physical mail to its owners.
At first glance, this dataset gives us a broad understanding of how many registered businesses exist in LA. It can also be used to answer specific questions like: “How many furniture stores exist in LA”? Or “How many businesses were started in LA in 1997”? Or “Is there an imbalance of outpatient care centers in Pasadena compared to how many there are in Van Nuys”?. We can also use it to track down specific information about single businesses, like to figure out the mailing address of Kargowest Logistics in Chatsworth.
The dataset’s ontological structure would not be useful to patrons of these businesses, because it does not include information like store hours, menu items, or business ratings. It also fails to include information which would be useful to telemarketers, who would need to contact active businesses by phone, and organizations asking for donations, who would need to contact active businesses by email address.
If we were to start over to create a list which would be useful to business patrons and customers, we would not need to include information like “Mailing Address” or “Location” in GPS coordinates. Instead, we would replace these with content types such as “Store Hours”, “Phone Number”, Menu Items”, “1-5 rating on Yelp”, “Parking Information”, “Are Reservations Required”, and “Do They Deliver”. This information very different from the kind of information which exists in the current dataset, because it is pertinent to the nature of the services which the businesses are providing rather than the structure of businesses themselves.
If we were to create a list which would be useful to historians, we may include information such as “Founder’s Name”, “Founder’s Living Status”, “Investors Name”, “Founders Contact Information”. This dataset would be different from both the first dataset and the dataset for customers, because it would be specifically relevant to anybody who seeks to understand the story behind the business and the conditions under which it was founded.

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