Terms & Definitions
Agency | A police department or organization, like "Aurora Police Department". Agencies often have parent-child relationships to one another. |
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criminal legal system | Law enforcement, courts, and corrections. Our focus is on the United States. |
data accessibility | This is a scale which we're still defining.
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data custody / provenance | Who collected and published the data? agency_described (which agency is the data about?)originating_entity (who generated the records?)supplying _entity (who is publishing the records?)Sometimes these are all the same entity; sometimes they are all different. |
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. |
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 | A bit of code responsible for collecting an Extraction from a Data Source or Archive. Check out the GitHub repo. For more about our philosophy, start here. Colloquially, "scraper" may refer to a person writing a Scraper. |
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. |
Last modified 1mo ago