Licensed Food Establishments in Boston

This data set contains records for all licensed food establishments in the city of Boston. The data set ranges from 2006 to the present. The data set was collected by the Department of Innovation and Technology in Boston.

The Department of Innovation and Technology aims to improve the lives of Bostonians through technology. Technology is an ever growing and evolving industry and the Department of Innovation and Technology attempts to utilize it for the betterment of the city. This dataset is an example of this. People are able to have this information at their fingertips in an easy to use and (decently) easy to understand format.

To clarify, the Department of Innovation and Technology are of course not the ones managing these licenses. That’s left up to The Health Division of the Department of Inspectional Services. So it may be more accurate to say that this dataset is a collaboration between the Department of Innovation and Technology and The Health Division of the Department of Inspectional Services. But if you look at this dataset and have questions about it, it’s the Department of Innovation and Technology that you’d be contacting.

When looking at the data set, I was left curious about some seemingly missing data. Some properties are missing a property number or a latitude and longitude position or both. For instance, Cafe 129 is missing all of these data points. I looked into whether this was because it was closed and thus they didn’t bother to include the data, but it’s still operational (additionally, there is also a column denoting whether they are active or not). Then I thought that the data may be missing because it’s owned by a college, but other establishments also are missing this data. Perhaps they just didn’t deem it as important to have this data as to have a database of all establishments with licenses.

This is less of a question I have and more of a statement, but I wish they included an information page denoting more specifically what towns/zip codes are included in the data. I’d also be curious to know what exactly the city’s standards are in regards to licensing an establishment. This is something that can be found out easily enough, but I think it would be relevant to denote this alongside the data to put it into better context, but perhaps that’s our jobs to do as journalists and not the city’s.
It would be relevant to interview both individuals from the Department of Innovation and Technology to understand the process of this data collection and the missing data points, as well as individuals from the Health Division of the Department of Inspectional Services to find out more about the process of these establishments getting licensed to give us better context for the data.