Control LA is a site in which sources where the money within Los Angeles goes, who is a top earner, etc. The focus I worked on was the Top City Earners within Los Angeles. While ontology is the main focus of this blog, we can assume that the Los Angeles accounting office can account for a large majority of the use of this visualize data. In addition tax payer money and pay rolls are of interest to the general public, because the knowledge and us elf hard earned money is important during a stiff economy like today.
While navigating through the page you can see that you can pick the particular year, which dates who was the top earner in addition to how they were categorized by pay.
The categories for pay are as follows: Base Pay, Permanent Bonus Pay, Longevity Bonus Pay, Temporary Bonus Pay, Overtime, Lump Sum Pay, and Other Pay and Adjustments. Analyzing these data points you can find out that majority of pay is of course based on Base Pay, however the second most payed item is overtime.
The data is presented within a bar graph, which is color coated and easily highlights each item. This data is easy to visually recognize and presents itself well enough for the general public to understand without fully knowing the particular numbers for each. However, if you would like to look at specifics you can click on the particular graph and they will give you the numbers and the actual figures for each particular occupation.
Additionally you can teach the annual earnings by each department. For example LA DWP is one of the most populated graphs and contains a large percentage of earnings by the Los Angeles county itself.
The ontology for this data set can be easily understood as the identification of dollars spent by Los Angeles county for its employees. These employees can differentiate the different sums and lack of money spent within each department.
The data set can be used for things such as campaigns in order to fund more for particular departments and can utilized by the departments to gain more funding. However the flaws within this site include, a recent change has not been made to this particular site in the 9 months which could show some form of influx or change. Additionally it is not specified as to what Other Pay & Adjustments can be referred to. The data set should reflect more than 4 years however it only specifies 2011 – 2014. While the data does lack some substance, visually it is understandable and communicates to the audiences it is set for.