Data wants to be free, or something like that….
Now that the FCC has made it easier to see all their data, it’s possible to construct information from the raw data that you can’t do by visiting the FCC web site. It also exposes how sloppy the FCC management of their data is. They just appointed a couple guys to work on this – it’s a big job.
Each Media Bureau application has parties – points of contact, lawyers, owners, consulting engineers…. those are stored in a table called “Party”. The Party # is tied to that specific entity/person.
One of the problems with database design is whether you need to capture historical information. Let’s say you have an attorney who does a lot of FCC work, and is a “Party” to a large number of applications over the last 20 years. He moves to a new office and gets a new phone number. If I print out a 10 year old application, do I want to see his address at that time, or his current address? (What if he is dead?)
The FCC seems to be moving toward a thing called an FRN (FCC Registration Number) that ties everything you do together like a social security number for the FCC. – but the old systems don’t use the FRN. The result is the same “Party” occurs in the party table perhaps 100s of times with slightly different information.
Even so, it is interesting information – given the name of an attorney, you can see 20+ years of history of every application they were a party to, etc…
You can wander around by starting at the list of current applications – look at the parties involved in that app, and follow your nose
http://streamingradioguide.com/recent-apps.php
or you can go right to the Party search and type in a part of a name and find all the parties that match your search, and then all of the appplications they were involved with (at least under that party ID#)
http://dev.streamingradioguide.com/partyapps.php
Let’s say you knew there was a DC attorney named ZARAGOZA who does a lot of FCC work…
http://streamingradioguide.com/partyapps.php?search=ZARAGOZA