Hi there! In this project I will be looking at datasets through data.gov and identifying what data cities are collecting and why. To get started I went to data.gov and searched up “towed cars” and filtered the results to local government.
I selected the first result which tracks vehicle repairs and towing in Montgomery County in Maryland.
I then went into this dataset and put the data into OpenRefine.
Once I made this data a project I could see all of the details of it. There were 2,426 items in this set.
From this data you can see that a lot of information is taken for each item including the company that made the repair or towed the vehicle, the town this happened in, contact information, and the date these incidents occurred.
This information is being recorded by the county because it can track what companies are getting the most business from these occurrences, which can help the economies of that area. It tracks people who have had many instances of their cars being towed and see if there is a specific reason why that is. It also tracks the areas in towns and cities that are common places for cars to get towed, this can help with patrolling those areas better or creating a solution so less people get towed.
Some issues with this data include a lack of uniformity and ease of use of the data. First, the data entered is not all the same, for example in the “state” tab the word Maryland is entered as “MD,” “Md,” and “Maryland.” All of these different ways of entering the state can make it harder to filter the results because a user would need to enter all three to get all of the information they needed.
The ease of use of the data is also an issue because there are many sections of the data that are missing, making getting accurate analytics from the data more difficult. The data is not very detailed either, with only basic information being available, with more detailed data government officials would be able to learn even more about vehicle repairs and towing in their county.
Overall this data is useful for the county and is a great resource, OpenRefine is a useful tool and helps with organizing the data very well and makes the data readable.
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