https://controllerdata.lacity.org/Payroll/Top-City-Earners/78mt-gezm
This dataset lists all of the top paid public employees of Los Angeles county, and also has a few different methods of visualization and comparison that the user can use to get a better sense of how the county government is allocating its funds. The data types are primarily monetary, as the dataset is essentially the payroll of all the county’s highest earners. A single record in the set consists of a job title, along with their annual pay, which is then broken up into smaller categories including base pay, bonus pay, overtime, and lump sum pay. By default, when the site is opened it presents the data in a stacked bar graph of the types of pay of the employees, ranking from the highest down.
Wallack and Srinivasan define ontology as a system of categories and their interrelations by which groups order and manage information about what’s around them. The ontology of this dataset comes from the county government to be as transparent as possible in showing taxpayers where their money is going by creating varieties of visualizations that present the allocation of funds. While they do a decent job of making the information easily accessible and understandable, it is definitely geared toward the public and the citizens of Los Angeles who may be wanting information about how their government is running finances.
However, some aspects of the information are quite vague and it is not easily discernible what the job titles explicitly mean and what these employees are actually doing to earn their salary. Nonetheless, if the user does a bit more research this dataset gives great information about what is most important to the running of the county; for instance, the single highest paid employee is the Chief Port Pilot who runs Long Beach port, and the most funds are allocated to the police department. While this ontology doesn’t easily allow input from the actual citizens of Los Angeles on whether or not they believe this is the proper way to organize funds, the effort toward transparency is a step toward including the public more.
That being said, if I were to reorganize this dataset with a different ontology seeking to get more interaction from the people funding public jobs, I would add a feature that compared the reality of the salaries to the public’s idea of what would be appropriate, thereby allowing more collaboration on the issue and clearly showing every party involved how to best balance the financial wants and needs of Los Angeles.