This research question was the subject of an investigation conducted between the dates of September 2018 to January 2019, to try to answer a simple question: who really owns your city?
The key question was focused on trying to identify ultimate ownership of businesses that consumers frequent, and which of those businesses truly constituted the tag of being "locally owned". The research conducted focused on Pasadena, California as a case-study city, and consisted of trying to identify the source ownership of all 13,000+ Pasadena businesses.
For this investigation, research was conducted by taking the names of existing businesses in the Pasadena area, and following their ownership trail until the ultimate owner was identified. A variety of data sources were used to identify ownership (and other miscelleneous) information.
The following data sources were used to compile final results:
The results of this research project consisted of a database storing key business information, including ownership. The database was derived primarily from data obtained from Reference USA – access which was provided from the Pasadena Public Library. This data was then supplemented with geographic information, like geo-location, from OpenStreetsMap’s Nomination Service. Analytics from the resultant database were used to generate the below Infographic, with the help of the codebase below and visualization tools like Elastic Kibana.
The below infographic represents a subset of aggregated results from this research exercise, specifically for Pasadena. Key findings highlighted below include:
One of the results of this project was to generate a codebase that could generate graphs, charts, and numerical data on the nature of business ownership for any city, including Pasadena, California.
You may follow the below link and build / run the code below for any city in the United States or Canada, and generate similar charts as demonstrated in the infographic above
Business OwnerSHip Analyzer (BOSHA)