opencorporates – The Open Corporate Database of the World
A “alpha” status project that is collecting corporate registration/report information from around the world.
As of 21 May 2011, 12,678,041 companies.
Five US states plus District of Columbia, United Kingdom, Netherlands and a scattering of others.
This is a useful data source, provided the corporations of interest fall in a covered jurisdiction.
The following video illustrates the usefulness of this site:
How to use OpenCorporates to match companies in Google Refine
Certainly looks like a useful tool for populating a topic map to me!
That may be the ultimate value of all the Linked Data efforts. Being the step before reconciliation of information into a reliable form for merger with other reconciled information. At some point raw information has to be gathered together and a rough cut gathering with Linked Data is as good as any other method.