The data used in the creation of this website comes from a listing of all active businesses in Los Angeles that are currently registered with the Office of Finance. This data set is powered by Socrates API and provides the location account number, (legal) business name, DBA (Doing Business As) name, street address, city, zip code, location description, mailing address, mailing city, mailing zip code, NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code, primary NAICS description, council district number, location start date (the start date of the first business activity registered) and end date, and location coordinates for each business. There are a total of 509,186 businesses registered, which we then narrowed down to the 429 full-service restaurants located in Koreatown using the Los Angeles Times’s mapping of Koreatown. A social phenomenon that this dataset can illustrate is the behavior in the economy in the Los Angeles area since 1972; this dataset also illustrates how businesses have developed since that time and highlights specific sectors of the economy that have emerged and grown throughout the years. Although the manner in which the data is presented and divided (by business name/type, founding date, NAICS number, and physical location) are fairly objective, the subjectivity is derived from the business owners and whether or not they choose to register their business. It is also up to the discretion of the U.S. Census Bureau what to categorize a business as using the NAICS code system.

To answer our questions regarding the types of food served and the price ranges of each restaurant, we used Yelp to search restaurants by name or address and looked at the tags of what category of food the restaurant is associated with (i.e. Chinese, Mexican, etc.) as well as the number of dollar signs listed on each restaurant’s profile.

We also conducted both in-person and over-the-phone interviews with a few restaurant owners in Koreatown, which we recorded (with their permission) and transcribed, in order to supplement our data.

Within the given dataset, the only qualitative traits we have are the type of business and the location. The only quantitative characteristic we have is the date the business was established. There were some gaps in the original dataset, primarily with the latitude and longitude coordinates. To account for this, we used the UCLA Web Geocoder to pull the missing coordinates using the street addresses provided. There was also missing information regarding some of the DBA names, which made it difficult to find some of the restaurants on Yelp, especially when there are multiple restaurants in the same plaza with the same street address, so there may be some full-time restaurants in Koreatown that are not covered by our data. Aside from information missing within existing attributes, the dataset does not contain an attribute describing the name of each business owner or any other ownership-specific information. Additionally, there is no attribute listing each business according to its yearly income or any metric of the economic size of the business.

Taking into account the recent advancements in technology and the less rigid immigration laws, there is a possibility that the spike in the number of full-service restaurants opened in Koreatown over the past few years is due to variable factors unaccounted for in the data. Although business owners are legally required to register their business with the Office of Finance, the strict immigration laws of the past could have deterred Korean immigrant business owners from doing so, in fear that their immigration status would be on the line. Technological advancements also makes it much easier to register a business online instead of solely in person, which could be helpful to Korean immigrants who are unable to speak fluent English. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing for sure if every single full-service restaurant in Koreatown is registered with the Office of Finance. Regardless of this, our team was still able to conduct a sufficient amount of research and analysis given the information available to us.