Announcing open corporate network data: not just good, but better
OpenCorporates announces three projects:
1. An open data corporate network platform
The most important part is a new platform for collecting, collating and allowing access to different types of corporate relationship data – subsidiary data, parent company data, and shareholding data. This means that governments around the world (and companies too) can publish corporate network data and they can be combined in a single open-data repository, for a more complete picture. We think this is a game-changer, as it not only allows seamless, lightweight co-operation, but will identify errors and contradictions. We’ll be blogging about the platform in more details over the coming weeks, but it’s been a genuinely hard computer-science problem that has resulted in some really innovative work.
2. Three key initial datasets
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The shareholder data from the New Zealand company register, for example, is granular and up to date, and if you have API access is available as data. It talks about parental control, often to very granular data, and importing this data allows you to see not just shareholders (which you can also see on the NZ Companies House pages) but also what companies are owned by another company (which you can’t). And it’s throwing up some interesting examples, of which more in a later blog post.
The data from the Federal Reserve’s National Information Center is also fairly up to date, but is (for the biggest banks) locked away in horrendous PDFs and talks about companies controlled by other companies.
The data from the 10-K and 20-F filings from the US Securities and Exchange Commission is the most problematic of all, being published once a year, as arbitrary text (pretty shocking in the 21st century for this still to be the case), and talks about ‘significant subsidiaries’.
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3. An example of the power of this dataset.
We think just pulling the data together as open data is pretty cool, and that many of the best uses will come from other users (we’re going to include the data in the next version of our API in a couple of weeks). But we’ve built in some network visualisations to allow the information to be explored. Check out Barclays Bank PLC, Pearson PLC, The Gap or Starbucks.
OpenCorporates is engineering the critical move between “open data,” ho-hum, to “corporate visibility using open data.”
Not quite to the point of “accountability” but you have to identity evil doers before they can be held accountable.
A project that merits your interest, donations and support. Please pass this on. Thanks!