Rich Exner, data analysis editor at cleveland.com, has an outstanding analysis today of how property tax rates differ around Ohio. His story has a searchable database for all municipalities and school districts in seven northern Ohio counties, plus a map of the average tax rate in every Ohio county.

The five Ohio counties with the highest average property tax rates are, in order, Cuyahoga, Montgomery, Franklin, Lucas and Hamilton. The highest property rate in all of Ohio belongs to part of Harrison Township, located near Dayton.

Did you know we didn’t know this before today?

Exner’s analysis overcomes a serious barrier to understanding property taxes in The Buckeye State. Ohio has thousands of governmental jurisdictions that levy property taxes. The jurisdictions overlap — a school district may cover many municipalities or vice versa, for example — making it nearly impossible to compare one place to another in a meaningful way.

Complexity is not a taxpayer’s friend. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Ohio’s Department of Taxation does a good job of providing tax data in raw form, but making the data meaningful requires heavy lifting by smart people.

Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel has done a great job putting spending data online (at ohiocheckbook.com). The state web site documents every check written by most state agencies (but not universities) and nearly 500 local governments (more on the way). The web site is searchable, but the real value is so far untapped: the massive raw data itself. “Big Data” drives the modern economy. It’s how Google Maps tells you the best route from Place X to Place Y. Big Data lets smart, technically savvy people harvest patterns previously invisible.

The Buckeye Institute was the first to put government salary data online. Big Data. Since 2010, more than 13 million searches have been done on this data, a testament to the utility of the information.

cleveland.com, a sister company to The Plain Dealer, deserves thanks for organizing property tax data in a way that helps us understand how our governments function. The dataset isn’t massive — like ohiocheckbook.com — but it’s darn complicated. Exner’s report doesn’t tell us whether tax rates are too high or too low. It just tells what tax rates are. It’s an example of transparency at its best.