Out of a total of a possible 100 points, the average score was just 21, with several major countries (including Spain, Greece and Brazil) scoring zero. A score of 100 means that the company register is an open data register, making detailed information free for reuse under an open licence, and also makes the information available as open data. A score of zero means the central register can not even be search without payment or registration.

Highest score is the Czech Republic, with a score of 50, though the UK will achieve a score of 70 when it starts publishing a limited set of data under an open licence in July.

Virtually all OGP countries score very badly for openness of company data, with several – including countries such as Spain, Greece and Brazil – effectively closed for the public, civil society and the wider world, undermining corporate governance, and providing a fertile ground for corruption, money laundering, organised crime, and tax evasion

The full report is available here, and the data is available (under an open licence at http://bit.ly/ogp_open_company_data), but a summary of the data should be available below:

Update: broken links fixed

First, we wanted it to have as its central mission the opening of company data for the public good.

Second, we wanted it to be sustainable, not dependent on the vagaries of grants or government funding, but generating income from adding value to public data by making it more useful, more accessible and, crucially, more reusable.

Third, we wanted it to help develop the open data ecosystem with an innovative and successful business model that could help make the open data world a first-class player in the business community, the way open source is in the software world.

Because of this, we set up OpenCorporates as a for-profit (technically speaking we set up a for-profit company, Chrinon Ltd, that is the publisher of OpenCorporates), giving us a fair degree of freedom, and allowing us, if we wanted to, to accept investment. Were we founded in the US, we may have gone down the route of a B-Corporation, a for-profit that includes social good in its governing principles, and that’s something we may well look at in the future.

But as we grow, we need to make sure the third of those goals doesn’t subsume the first. We also needed an honest friend to give us feedback on tricky issues – helping us tread the path between the various competing rights – and to tell us when they thought we were going down the wrong path.

To do that we’ve set up an Advisory Board, but one with teeth. Their core goal is to be that honest friend that we wanted – one who shares our goals and ideals but is willing and able to criticise us when they disagree. But they will also have the power to make a difference to what we do. Cutting to the chase, this is what we’ve agreed:

• The Advisory Board would be consulted on key strategic directions, to help ensure that OpenCorporates/Chrinon Ltd (the company behind OpenCorporates) acts in the wider public interest.
• The Advisory Board would be a resource for OpenCorporates to ask for advice, e.g. on policy where there’s a balance of competing interests (privacy etc).
• The Advisory Board would normally keep its discussions with OpenCorporates private, but could go public if it strongly felt OpenCorporates was behaving badly, or going in the wrong direction. Prior to doing that it would engage with OpenCorporates to try to find a mutually acceptable solution.
• The Advisory Board would be regularly given a data dump of the entire OpenCorporates database (which is under the ODbL licence), which it could release to the community in the case that either OpenCorporates went into liquidation, or dissolved in some other way, or should OpenCorporates have veered sufficiently from acting in the wider public interests the Board felt it necessary to help create a fork of the project.

We think this goes further than any other similar project, and helps ensures that we always keep central that goal of opening company data for the public good.

There are currently three members of the board, all of whom have exceptional credentials in the open data and transparency world. We may well appoint further members to the board (with the agreement of the existing members) in the future, for example to widen the area of expertise. The members are:

• David Eaves David needs no introduction to the open data community, and his 3 Laws Of Open Data were a key influence on us, but he describes himself as “a public policy entrepreneur, open government activist and negotiation expert”. He is retained by several governments to advise on open government and open data, works with two spin-offs of the Harvard Negotiation Project and advises businesses on open source strategies and community management.
• Kaitlin Lee Kaitlin is the senior developer for the Subsidyscope, Clearspending and Six Degrees of Corporations projects at the Sunlight Foundation. She researches transparency related issues in several areas of federal spending, including tax expenditures, risk transfers and contracting. She holds a B.S. in Applied Math from Johns Hopkins.
• Andrew Stott Andrew was the UK’s first Director for Transparency and Digital Engagement.  He led the work to open government data and create data.gov.uk; and after the 2010 Election he led the policy development and implementation of the new Government’s commitments on Transparency of central and local government.
  Following his formal retirement in December 2010 he was appointed to the UK Transparency Board to continue to advise UK Ministers on open data and e-government policy.  He also advises other governments both bilaterally and through the World Bank and the World Wide Web Foundation.

In fact the Advisory Board has already proved invaluable to us in numerous discussions, and helped us draw up the OpenCorporates principles. They also provide an important reassurance to the rest of the community, and perhaps even a template for other open data organisations too.

Last week OpenCorporates was in Basel at the Financial Stability Board‘s workshop on Global Legal Entity Identifiers (LEI) for corporate entities, as a member of the advisory panel.

It’s worth giving a sentence or two’s background here for those who aren’t familiar with this – and that’s probably everyone who’s not part of the global financial regulatory community or concerned with identifying corporate entities in the financial community.

The core idea of the global LEI is to allow all participants in financial activity to get a unique id that could be used to identify them in financial activity anywhere in the world, in any activity. This stems from the desire to reduce systematic risk such as those that nearly brought down the entire financial system post-Lehman’s. Part of this clearly requires the surfacing and publishing of the relationships between different companies within the same corporate group, sometimes called a corporate hierarchy, though we’re actually taking about a web of corporate entities, rather than a hierarchy as such.

The workshop was conducted under Chatham House Rules, and so we can’t share any papers or attribute quotes, but we can touch on some of the general discussions, including the one on why collecting this hierarchical information was potentially problematic.

This is because some companies – and in fact some company registers, especially secrecy jurisdictions – consider this information to be confidential. Specifically, to quote a paper by Linda Powell of the Federal Reserve Board et al, “A common reason provided for why a relationship between entities should not be public is that releasing the ownership data to the public could harm the competitive advantage of an entity.”

We were speaking on one of the panels regarding the scope of the work, and when it was our turn to speak, this was one of the key issues we addressed. We said, in short, that this was nonsense. We couldn’t think of a single legitimate reason why a company would refuse to publish its corporate structure.

First, this is not about legitimate commercial confidentiality but about protecting incumbents’ power, position and, often, legacy business models.

Second, this is often as not about evading scrutiny – from society, from shareholders, and from regulators. Make it difficult enough to understand the hundreds or thousands of complex legal entities making up a global corporation such as BP, and you can do what you want. This is not how a responsible company should behave, and not a reason for keeping this secret.

Third, if it is does reduce a company’s competitive advantage, that’s a Good Thing, because this is one competitive advantage that is positively harmful. Competitive advantage should be about coming up with a better way of doing something, taking a risk on a new product and reaping the benefits, having a closer relationships with your customers, and so on. Not obscuring the public record so that it’s impossible for the wider world to understand who they’re doing business with, competing with, investing in or regulating. (Encouragingly this got a excellent response from the workshop attendees.) I think we know where this ends up (Enron, CDOs?), and it’s not in a good place.

Fourth, this lack of transparency, enabled in part by company registers restricting information about companies to those who can afford the high prices, forces all companies to play the dodge the regulator/tax/public scrutiny game. This reduces the attention spent by good companies on real-world innovation and being a good corporate citizen, and forces all into a game of regulatory arbitrage, playing jurisdictions and regulators against each other to force them to a race to the bottom that leaves companies able to act outside the law.

[It's worth remembering that company are artificial legal entities formed and sanctioned by the state, and that limited liability companies are ones where the cost of failure is borne not by the owners but its customers, suppliers, workers and society at large.]

Finally, as the World Bank’s compelling Puppet Masters report makes clear, this opacity of corporate structures is precisely the fertile ground which allows corruption and organised crime to flourish, as this cloak of ‘corporate confidentiality’ is used to hide all manner of illegal, criminal and anti-social behaviour.

So the next time a large corporation says they can’t or won’t publish the information about their corporate structure ask them just what they’re trying to hide.

p.s. In the spirit of full disclosure, Chrinon Ltd, the company behind OpenCorporates is 90% owned by Chris Taggart, 10% owned by Rob McKinnon and has no subsidiary companies or parent companies.

We did it – last week we went over the 40 million companies mark, with the addition of our 52st jurisdiction: Mauritius. As well as being quite a significant milestone in itself, we’re also using this as an excuse to replace that alpha tag that’s graced the top right hand corner of OpenCorporates since we launched with a beta one (we’re still rapidly developing, after all).

In truth, we should have replaced it some time ago, as not only have we become the largest open database of companies in the world by far, we’re also being increasingly recognised by (for want of a better word) the establishment. We’ve previously written about our work with the UK government, and with the EU/W3c’s work on a business vocabulary, but recently we were also appointed to the advisory panel (pdf) for the Financial Stability Board‘s work on a global legal entity identifier. Like the EU/W3c work this is important for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s a recognition that the problems of finding, understanding and influencing companies is a global problem that can’t be solved by the regulators and officials alone. If the community – and by community I mean open data community, journalists, civil society, innovators, and even companies themselves – isn’t empowered with the tools it needs to do this, we’ll end up with not just innovation atrophying as large companies entrench their position, but democracy being marginalised.

Second, it’s a recognition of the important and pioneering work that OpenCorporates has done in this area, on resources that are, frankly, what the big business-data companies spend on tea and biscuits.

Third, it’s a sign that these big institutions – check out the Financial Stability Board’s website for an idea of what we’re talking about – are beginning (and I’d stress the beginning) to embrace the concept of open data, and the dangerous effects of the existing asymmetries of access to data. In fact, our inclusion is doubly impressive, given that we’ve written publicly and forcefully about company identifiers, and can be relied upon to say what we think is right, rather than going along with the cosy consensus.

And this recognition is important too, because it says that open is right, and thus begins to isolate those company registers who are not interested in transparency, but only in selling the data to those with deep pockets – in Europe countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece come to mind, none of which even allows free and open searches to check the existence of a company, and are even less transparent than most tax havens.

One of the most often requested features for OpenCorporates, especially by journalists, is for us to extract information about the directors and officers for the over 35 million companies we’ve opened up.

And as Alex Howard reported on O’Reilly Radar last week, that feature is now live (we also gave a sneak peak during our presentation at the Investigative Reporters and Editor’s NICAR conference last month).

So far we’ve imported over 10 million positions, and the ability to search by name across all the jurisdictions for which we have officer information. At the moment that’s:

• Arizona
• Canada
• Connecticut
• Florida (in progress – 5 million done, probably about another 3 million to go!)
• Idaho
• Louisiana (in progress)
• Mississippi
• Rhode Island
• South Dakota
• Vermont

and coming soon: New Zealand. (We’ve also got a handful from Massachusetts but they’ve blocked our scraper – now why would they want to prevent people getting access to this information?)

You’ll notice that the UK’s not on there (nor in fact are any European countries), which is somewhat embarrassing for it, given the UK government’s stated aim of being the most open government in the world. Unfortunately while the information is held, it’s only sold to those with deep pockets, thus undermining access, and reducing both corporate transparency and governance. In short, we could buy it, but then we’d have to stop being openly licensed, and that’s a route we’re never going to go down.

It’s also worth noting that there are several key jurisdictions that don’t actually collect this information, including Delaware and Nevada – and here you’d think there’s nothing we could do about this. However, you’d be wrong, and I’ll explain why with a concrete example.

Search for Mitt Romney, and you see that he’s listed as being an officer for 7 companies, including chairman and director of Healthcare Acquisitions, which is a foreign branch company in Mississippi. In fact this is a branch, set up in 1989, of a Delaware company, as you can see if you click through the company page, and then to the official registry page. So even though we don’t yet have that Delaware company (and even we did, we wouldn’t be able to get the directors), you can still find out the directors information.

Click instead on the name Mitt Romney on one of the entries on the search page and you get this page:

As you can see, not only do you get the company this particular position belongs to and the other officers,names of the fellow directors, you also get the other companies with similarly named people. And that’s an important distinction that’s worth stressing. We’re not saying that John Smith, Director of Megacorp Inc, is the same person as John Smith, Secretary of AnotherCo LLC. We don’t have that information, and, actually, neither does anyone else in general.

But what it does allow you to do is in a matter of seconds do the sort of research that would have previously taken hours. And if the web isn’t about reducing by several orders of magnitude the time or cost of things, then it’s not being truly disruptive.

p.s. We’re adding the officer search and info functionality to the next version of the OpenCorporates API, which we’re currently working on. Watch this space.

One of the things we’re most proud of with OpenCorporates is the way we quietly get on with making the world’s biggest open database of companies bigger and better, adding territories with the help of the open data community. Every day we make thousands of HTTP requests, scrapes, and downloads to OpenCorporates, constantly adding companies, filings, and other data.

There’s probably a blog post just itemising the stats behind OpenCorporates, but for today to we just want to focus on one in particular (and it ties in nicely with the presentation we’re giving this afternoon at the Investigative Reporters & Editors’ NICAR conference). This weekend, we finished adding Louisiana to OpenCorporates, the 11th US state we’ve added this year, and bringing the today number to 22, and the total number of companies we have to 36 million. For the record the other states are:

• Connecticut
• Arizona
• Idaho
• Maine
• Massachusetts
• Mississippi
• Oklahoma
• Pennsylvania
• South Dakota
• Vermont

Florida doesn’t quite make that list, as it’s still being imported (we’ve just over a million Florida companies so far). While we haven’t yet got every state in the US, we’re well on our way, and we’ve got several more in the pipeline, meaning the day is in sight not only when you can do one search across all the US and get back every Google entity, for example, but get the whole thing back as openly licensed data, too.

Of course, there are some obstacles in the way, not least Delaware and Illinois, but we’re hoping that before we get to those they’ll embrace transparency and open data

This weekend, the EU published its public draft of its Business Vocabulary (along with Person and Location), to help make it easier for organisations within Europe, including governments themselves, to exchange information relating to companies.

Now if I haven’t already lost your attention, I think this is pretty important, and not just those who handle corporate data, but to also to all those interested in openness in general, for three reasons:

1. The vocabulary democratises the ability to share this important information, removing the need for restrictive central registers, which are inevitably tied up with process, governance and access issues;
2. The results are free of IP restrictions;
3. The fast, lightweight process was an example of a huge organisation (the European Commission) for once being focused on solving immediate problems rather than grandiose undeliverable: in short the EC went for a Minimum Viable Product.

I think it’s worth tackling these in a little more detail, but feel free to skip the first or second and skip to the process bit, if that’s what floats your boat.

[I should also state that  OpenCorporates was a member of the Working Group that put the vocabulary together and was fairly heavily involved in the Business Vocabulary discussions, having arguably done more to open company information than any other organisation in the recent history. It's also worth saying that this process wouldn't have achieved anything had it not be for the excellent work of the W3c's Phil Archer and the EC's Piotr Madziar and Vassilios Peristeras]

1 The Business Vocabulary

Like including mathematical equations in a book, the phrase ‘business vocabulary’ is an excellent way of putting off any ‘normal’ people who might otherwise be interested. Yet like the protocols that underlie the internet, getting this sort of thing right matters, and really all we really mean by business vocabulary is not some heavyweight XML schema, but a lightweight set of agreed terms and principles that remove the barriers for communication.

In this case it’s very lightweight, as there as there’s only really one critical part: what is a company, and how do we identify it? Despite the simplicity of the question, this is an area in which it’s easy to tie yourself into knots, should you want to. Countries have very different ways of thinking of companies (are partnerships or sole traders companies, for example?), and different ways of creating them too, sometimes handling them centrally, or giving the job to regional registers or courts.

The Business Vocabulary neatly sidesteps this, instead focusing on two core elements: a Legal Entity and a Formal Identifier. If you’re going to exchange information about a company it needs to be a legal entity, and it needs to have a (single) formal identifier. And that’s pretty much it. The only thing to add is that the formal identifier is made up of two parts: the identifier (e.g. a ‘company number’) and an issuing authority (e.g. a company register), which would ideally be identified by a URI.

See that wasn’t so bad was it

There are a handful of other properties that are listed, including the date of issue of the identifier, the registered address, company type, some of which are more clearly defined than others, but really that’s it. But already, it allows company registers around Europe to start publishing their data, and consuming other company registers’ data (for example, to understand the status of home companies for foreign branches they have registered) without the need for a highly centralised clearing house with its own closed system of data exchange.

It’s also worth stressing that this solution is not tied to any particular representation. It could be turned into a string identifier, linked data, or XML of some sort. Whichever is used, transformation from one to the other should be easy.

2. Open data and open standards

One of the best outcomes of the process, is that the resultant Business Vocabulary is genuinely open, unencumbered by IP restrictions. More than this, however, the whole process was focused on this outcome, with all agreeing this from the start. (In fact all participants were required to explicitly agree that their contributions would be free of IP restrictions, meaning the contributed use cases and discussions on them can also be openly published.)

This means, for example, that the list of identifying authorities also needs to be free of IP restrictions, and it’s this sort of detail which really matters when we’re talking about open standards – one solution, particularly if the vocabulary is to be used outside the EU (which it certainly could be) would be for the W3c to maintain and publish this list, given its interest in the semantic web and IP-free solutions.

3. Minimum Viable Product process

Although it was never called this, the concept of a Minimum Viable Product seemed embedded in the process from the start, and it took a very different route to other governmental ones I’ve been involved with. Contributions were encouraged to made on a wiki, conference calls were held weekly with a strict one hour limit, and we were given a target deadline of the end of January (we started in November). No long meetings. No backroom deals. Admittedly by technology startup standards this may be slow, but for government bureaucracy standards this was definitely agile, and the tight timings really focused people’s minds on results.

So congratulations Phil & co and let’s hope we not just get some useful feedback on the vocabulary, but that other governmental  organisations can learn from the process too.

We’re going to split this post into two parts. The first is for those who have no knowledge of javascript, and just want to add the widget; the second for those who want to understand how it works.

The widget is simple both to install and use, and allows visitors to your site or blog to search for companies by name without leaving the site. There’s a demo page at http://api.opencorporates.com/tools/widget_example.html so you can try it out:

When you search, it simply adds the results below the search box:

1. Installing the widget

If ever added a widget to your site or blog, this should be very familiar. All you need to do is to paste these two lines inside the HTML wherever you want it to appear:

<script src="http://api.opencorporates.com/tools/widget.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<div class="ocwidget-container"></div>


…and that’s it! If you want to change the styling, you can – just have a look at the CSS that’s pulled in by the javascript, and override it in your own CSS file.

2. Understanding how the widget works

The widget has two parts. The second part is an empty <div> element that will hold the widget content; the first imports a javascript file from http://api.opencorporates.com/tools/widget.js and runs the javascript within it. This file has been ‘minified’ to remove all the redundant spaces and comments, so it’s easier instead to look at the commented, nicely spaced version at https://github.com/openc/OpenCorporates-tools/blob/master/widget.js .

The first part is semi-boilerplate, which checks whether a useful javascript code library called jQuery is available and if not loads it (if you were writing your own widget just for your website and already include this you could omit most of this). When it’s finished loading it, and the document itself has finished loading, it runs the setupDocument() function:

function setupDocument () {
var form_stuff = '';
  form_stuff += '<div class="ocwidget-header">
<h3><a href="http://opencorporates.com">OpenCorporates company search</a></h3>
<div class="scope">30 million companies, 35 jurisdictions</div>
</div>\n<form id="ocwidget-search" class="search" action="http://opencorporates.com/companies" method="get" accept-charset="UTF-8">
<div style="margin: 0; padding: 0; display: inline;"><input type="hidden" name="utf8" value="✓" /></div>\n<input id="openc_api_search_q" type="text" name="q" />\n<input class="button" type="submit" name="commit" value="Search" />\n</form>
<div class="loading" style="display: none;">Searching...</div>
<div id="ocwidget-result" style="display: none;"></div>
<div class="ocwidget-footer">Powered by <a href="http://opencorporates.com">OpenCorporates :: The Open Database Of The Corporate World</a></div>';
 jQuery('.ocwidget-container').html(form_stuff)
 jQuery("#ocwidget-search").submit(function(event) {
 event.preventDefault();
 if (jQuery("#ocwidget-result").is(":visible")) {jQuery("#ocwidget-result").slideUp("slow");}
 jQuery(".loading").show();
 var $form = jQuery( this ),
 term = $form.find( 'input[name="q"]' ).val(),
 url = $form.attr( 'action' ).replace('http://','http://api.') + '/search?callback=?';
 jQuery.getJSON( url, { q: term },
 function( data ) { insertCompanyData(data, term); }
 );
 });
 }

This function builds the basic HTML for the widget (first the CSS style and then the HTML itself), and puts it in the div you’ve already got on the page.

Next it uses jQuery to add a listener to the form you’ve just put on the page, looking out for when the submit action happens, and running the function attached when this happens. And that’s it for the setup. The rest is dealing with what happens when a form is submitted.

When this does happen, the first thing is that the normal behaviour of the submit button – to make a fresh HTTP request and treat the response as a new page – is disabled. Then if the results area is visible (i.e. because a search has already been made), it’s slid out of the way. Next a ‘Searching…’  message is shown to let the user know something’s happening.

After that the information on the form is obtained and submitted  via the jQuery.getJSON call. This makes an Ajax request to the url, and does something with the result, in this case runs the function insertCompanyData(data, term). A couple of things worth noticing here:

• The URL in the form isn’t actually for the OpenCorporates API, but for the main OpenCorporates websites. There’s no reason why you couldn’t use the API address in the form, but as this is, in part, a demonstration of how to use the API, and some people might want to use the javascript not as a widget but as a javascript-enabled HTML form on their website, it was worth showing a some nice graceful degradation. By using the OpenCorporates URL on the form, if javascript isn’t enabled  (e.g. visitors using screenreaders) the search will still work.
• We’ve added ‘?callback=’ to the URL. This tells jQuery we want to make a JSONP request, and that it should add a callback parameter, and handle the JSONP response accordingly. This gets over the ‘same-origin policy‘, which prevents scripts handling data from a different domain than you’re already on. It’s the fix that allows all these javascript widgets to work, but does require the API to understand and handle callback requests. Fortunately the OpenCorporates API does

Having made the request, the browser gets on with whatever it was doing, until the response comes back, and the the data (together with the term we searched for) is passed to  insertCompanyData():

function insertCompanyData (data, term) {
var companies = data.companies;
content = "<div class='summary'>Found <a href='http://opencorporates.com/companies?q=" + term + "'>" + data.total_count + " results</a></div>";
content += listAll(companies);
jQuery(".ocwidget-container .loading").hide();
jQuery( "#ocwidget-result" ).html(content).slideDown("slow");
}

This does what it says on the can, building up the results content with some useful information (the total number of responses, with a link to all the results on OpenCorporates). It iterates through each of the companies returned (via the listAll function), and then uses listItemFor to build up a <li> list element for each, consisting of the company name and link to the company page on OpenCorporates, the incorporation date if known, the curent status, and the jurisdiction code, which is made a little more readable by converting ‘gb’ to ‘GB’, and us_dc to US (DC). A CSS class is also added if the company is inactive, to allow us to show those in a different colour.

function listItemFor(company) {
  var jurisdiction = company.jurisdiction_code.replace(/_(\w+)/," ($1)").toUpperCase();
  var li = "<li class='" + (company.inactive ? 'inactive' : '') + "'>";
  li += " <a class='company' href='" + company.opencorporates_url + "'>" + company.name + "</a>, " + jurisdiction;
  li += company.incorporation_date ? ', ' + company.incorporation_date : "";
  li += company.current_status ? ', ' + company.current_status : "";
  li += "</li>";
  return li;
}

function listAll(coll) {
  if(coll.length && coll.length > 0){
    var listResult = "<ul>";
    for (var i = 0; i < coll.length && i < 8; i++) {
      var li = coll[i].company;
      listResult += listItemFor(li);
    }
    listResult += "</ul>";
    return listResult;
  }
  else { return '';}
}

And that’s it. It’s on GitHub, so feel free to fork it, or use the code for your own purposes, but please remember that OpenCorporates is under the Open Database Licence and so if you’re using the API, you must link back to the OpenCorporates as per the links requirements.

Who would have thought that 12 months later we would have become 10 times bigger, with over 30 million companies and over 35 jurisdictions, and lots of other data too. So we could use this as an example to talk about some of the many milestones in that period, about all the extra data we’ve added, about our commitment to open data, and the principles behind it.

We’re not going to do that however, instead we’d rather talk about the new API we’ve just launched, allowing full access to all the info, and importantly allowing searches via the API too. In fact, we’ve now got a full website devoted to the api, http://api.opencorporates.com, and on it you’ll find all the documentation, example API calls, versioning information, error messages, etc.

Here are the brief highlights:

• A versioned API, which means that you don’t have to immediately change your code when the API changes, as you can specify a version number to work against.
• Lightweight JSON responses (XML will be coming soon), perfect for widgets, smartphones and modern web applications.
• No registration is required, but an optional free API token allows higher usage limits.
• No additional licence restrictions – same open data terms as the rest of OpenCorporates, even for heavy users.
• All search parameters supported, allowing complex filtering by company type, status, data held, etc. Search data is paginated, with ability to increase results size. Search data can be sorted alphabetically or by match score.
• Full provenance with data, including source url and when it was retrieved.
• Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the API service will be shortly using different servers to the main website, ensuring that heavy usage of one won’t affect the service of the other

The API is not just for heavyweight users of corporate data. The JSON format is supported by a huge number of non-techie applications too, including visualisation tools, widget makers, and increasingly Google applications too, and ver the next month or so, we’ll give some examples of how to use it… unless you beat us too it.

Merry Christmas

The OpenCorporates Team

Company registers were some of the earliest forms of public registers, and the need for them to be open was recognized from the time they were set up. Today, companies play a much larger role in society, and in a data-driven world, it’s important that all of society has access to information about them, in a form and licence that allows for free reuse.

But it’s one thing to talk about open data; another thing to have it as your core principles, and that’s why we’ve decided to set out the first draft of the OpenCorporates principles – a codification, if you like, of what we do, and how we do it.

In part, this was down to a recognition that OpenCorporates has become an important part of the open data ecosystem, and is increasingly relied upon by journalists, the wider community, even governments. In that context, it’s important that it’s clear how we work, and that there are also clear benchmarks by which we can be judged.

It’s also a recognition that as with all things in the area of online information, there are conflicts between different rights and obligations, and it’s not always clear which is the right path to choose, and we hope the principles will help guide us when balancing those conflicting demands.

The OpenCorporates principles

1. Purpose: OpenCorporates exists to make information about companies and the corporate world more accessible, more discoverable, and more usable, and thus give citizens, community groups, journalists, other companies, and society as a whole the ability to understand, monitor and regulate them.
   To the extent that we have rights to the information in OpenCorporates (including database rights), we will licence it under a share-alike attribution licence, allowing free and open reuse even commercially. Organisations or companies that wish to use the information on a non-share-alike basis will need to pay for a non-share-alike version (for the privilege of not releasing the resultant information to the community), thus ensuring OpenCorporates has a sustainable business model and giving an incentive to release information back to the community.
2. Scope: The definition of a company varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, includes a variety of different legal forms used for a variety of purposes.
   OpenCorporates follows the basic principle that a company is a legal entity registered or incorporated by a company register or jurisdiction. We do not intend to create records on individuals, except insofar as they are registered as a business or connected with a business or other corporate entity on a public document or register. We do include dissolved companies as this is an important part of the public record, allowing customers, suppliers, and society at large to understand the past actions of companies and of those involved in them.
3. Accuracy and Transparency: OpenCorporates aims to be an accurate reflection of the official public record, especially company registers, and we will always be clear about from where and when we obtained the information. Should there be errors in the importing of data from a company register or other public record, in the automatic matching of information to companies, or in user-contributed information, we will aim to correct those errors in a timely manner once we have been notified of them.
4. Privacy. The owners of companies and the directors of them are often (though not always) individuals. Most countries make this information part of the official public record, to avoid fraud, corruption, and to ensure that companies aren’t able to avoid their responsibilities to the wider society.
   There is also in virtually every country a requirement to provide an official address, not least to ensure that legal redress can be obtained. Where directors or companies choose to submit a residential address there is arguably a conflict between the right to know, the right to free speech and the right to privacy.
   Where the balance is drawn between these potential conflicts is not always clear and varies from country to country. OpenCorporates shouldn’t seek to be an arbiter in this regard and we will defer to the official company register on what information is published about the individuals connection with companies, especially the owners and directors.
   Should a company register or other public data source remove or redact information about a person connected with the company, because, for example, their personal safety is at risk, we will update the OpenCorporates record in a timely manner once we’ve been informed, and will institute a procedure for temporarily removing the information while this is being carried out.

We’d welcome feedback on these principles. They are a work in progress, and we’re reviewing our internal processes to ensure we follow them.