# Terminology

| Term                      | Our definition                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            |
| ------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Agency                    | A police department or organization, like "Aurora Police Department". Agencies often have parent-child relationships to one another.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      |
| API                       | An Application Programming Interface, which allows computer programs to communicate with each other. [More on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API)                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
| criminal legal system     | Law enforcement, courts, and corrections. Our focus is on the United States.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              |
| data accessibility        | <p>This is a scale which we're still defining.</p><ol><li>The records should exist somewhere, but we need to locate them.</li><li>We know where records can be accessed.</li><li>There is historic data available in a stable archive.</li></ol>                                                                                                                          |
| data custody / provenance | <p>Who collected and published the data?</p><p><code>agency\_described</code> (which agency is the data about?)</p><p><code>originating\_entity</code> (who generated the records?)</p><p><code>supplying</code>\_<code>entity</code> (who is publishing the records?)</p><p>Sometimes these are all the same entity; sometimes they are all different.</p>               |
| Data Source               | A URL pointing to a place on a police website where public records may be scraped, like "police-agency.com/arrest-reports". [Read more here](/about/terms-and-definitions/what-is-a-data-source.md).                                                                                                                                                                      |
| Data Source archive       | A raw, unprocessed HTML archive of a Data Source at a specific time.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      |
| metadata                  | Packaged with data (like a Data Source or scraper extraction), metadata is information about when and how the data was collected.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         |
| public records            | Some information is required by federal, state, or local law to be public. Governments keep several types of public records, and make them publicly available to different degrees.                                                                                                                                                                                       |
| scraper / data scraper    | <p>A bit of code responsible for collecting an Extraction from a Data Source or Archive. Check out <a href="https://github.com/Police-Data-Accessibility-Project/scrapers/">the GitHub repo</a>. For more about our philosophy, <a href="/pages/7CIXC6lege0GFR9bsOWb">start here</a>.</p><p><em>Colloquially, "scraper" may refer to a person writing a Scraper.</em></p> |
| scraper extraction        | The result of running a Scraper is an "extraction", usually intended to further parse or process an HTML page or PDF into more usable data.                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |


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