pre-merged permit files?

[rpscott5]

General description

I've been working with your permit file you released (its amazing to have something like this at a county level). However, one challenge i've run into is the applicant names are either contractors and parcel owners depending on the municipality, which makes analyzing trends across the dataset challenging. Do you have a pre-merged bulk dataset/folder that might have both of these entries or records that contain multiple applicants (like in the Chicago open data permits), even if it is very messy? I can process the data on my end given raw data files in their native format.

Use case

We are working with the a group in Illinois to try to understand electrification potential across the county.

Universe

Building permit data for Cook County.

Unit of observation

Local building permit

Restrictions and exclusions

No response

Data delivery format

Other

Citation and use of Assessor data

• I agree to the above terms.

[jeancochrane]

Hey @rpscott5! Glad to hear you're working with our permit data on a project that sounds very cool. Unfortunately, we derive the applicant_name field in the Permits open data asset directly from a single field in our source database, and I'm not aware of any raw dataset that disaggregates between property owners and contractors (other than the City open data that you mentioned). The Data team doesn't have full visibility into the end-to-end permit processing workflow, so it's possible that the CCAO FOIA team may be able to dig something up for you if you were to file a request, but I would bet against the existence of such a dataset based on what I do know about the permit processing workflow.

There may be ways of disaggregating the field yourself, or at least making an educated guess. One way to start would be to attempt to classify persons vs. companies using a probabilistic parsing library like https://github.com/datamade/probablepeople. You could also try fuzzy matching against a dataset with parcel ownership information to try to identify permits that are submitted by homeowners, though I'm not aware of a high-quality public dataset that has that kind of ownership information.

I'll let @ccao-jardine correct me if I'm wrong about any of this, these are just my two cents based on what I know about these data!

[ccao-jardine]

Just closing this out, but @rpscott5, let us know if you have other questions!