Determine way to parse / categorize what housing location strings represent

[bepetersn]

@fgregg said:

Hi guys,

This may not be the best place to discuss it, but the majority of location codes are very simple.

Let's take Division I. It says on this page http://www.cookcountysheriff.org/doc/doc_DivisionsOfJail.html, that Division I has eight 'blocks' and four floors.

Once you know that, and you look at location numbers, it seems pretty clear that location "01-A-1-18-2" is in Division I, in the "A" Block, on the 1st floor. I don't know what 18-2 means.

You can also use this page http://www.cookcountysheriff.com/doc/doc_division1.html to help get a sense of what the subdivisions are.

It would be really worthwhile try to do this parsing for all the locations we can, because then we could identify the large residual category and tag them in the API. There are about a dozen or so of this "other" category, and include locations like 02- C-TRANSFER, KAKEE

[bepetersn]

This issue doesn't have a clear aim at the moment. I suppose what it entails is some research on our part, and data analysis. I'm gonna tag it with those things.

If I were going to work on this issue, I would start by querying our 1.0 API for housinglocation: http://cookcountyjail.recoveredfactory.net/api/1.0/housinglocation/?format=json. This shows that there are 6441 locations we know about. If someone is able to analyse this data, I think we can normalize a lot of these location names to division, block, and floor as @fgregg said above. Maybe just get this data into a google spreadsheet and start looking at all the ones that don't match.

[bepetersn]

This is housing's answer to issue #26.

[bepetersn]

@fgregg, I am pretty sure that "18-2" means cell 18, bed 2. The last number is almost always 1 or 2.

[fgregg]

Interesting!