Over the past six months, we’ve been asked again and again: What does a good company register look like – what should it do, what are some good examples, do we even need one? Most recently we were asked to feed into UK Companies House’s strategic review, asking precisely these questions.

So in this series of posts, we’re going to address these questions, going back to first principles and bringing them right up to date too, for the globalised, highly complex networked world we live in today.

So, let’s start at the beginning.  Why have a company register in the first place? It’s not, contrary to what some may have you believe, to generate revenue (we’ll come onto that later), but because companies are artificial creations, created out of thin air, and given a distinct legal personality separate from that of their owners or managers.

Why does it need a legal personality? Well, if it didn’t it’s just a collection of people working together (in some countries this is a de facto partnership), personally liable for what they do, and jointly responsible for assets and liabilities. A company allows the creation of an imaginary legal construct, owned and controlled by others, and able to enter into contracts, raise money, have assets and liabilities, and employ people. [Like fiat money, it's one of those things we take for granted but is actually rather more conceptual than most people think.]

Until the middle of the 19th century these were very rare things indeed – in Britain, for example, until 1844 they had to be formed by an Act of Parliament or a Royal Charter. But the arrival of the railways, and the need to raise money for the people building them, helped create the push for the joint-stock enterprise, and not too long afterwards, the limited-liability joint-stock enterprise.

If you think creating a legal personality is strange, the idea of limited liability is even more so, as what it means is that when the liabilities (debts) of a entity exceed its assets (the money the shareholders have put in and anything that’s been accrued since then), then the people that bear the shortfall are not the shareholders or the managers (who benefited from the profits), but the suppliers (who don’t get paid), the customers (who don’t get the goods they’ve paid for), the employees (who don’t get wages), and wider society (lost tax, bailed-out pension funds, benefits, cleanup of polluted sites, etc).

So strange is this, that when it was suggested many were horrified, as it not only seems counter-intuitive, but fundamentally unfair, and also offer huge potential for fraud. Gilbert and Sullivan even wrote an opera about it.

Yet the belief was, that by allowing these to exist, there would be more innovation, more investment – in short society would benefit. But that last point is a critical one – the justification behind them is not for the benefit of companies, or their owners, but the benefit of wider society.

Critical to this is the ability to take an informed decision about whether you want to do business with the company, work for it, or, in the case of the state, ensure that it does not engage in fraud or other criminal activities. As Robert Lowe, the Vice-President of the Board of Trade, said when introducing the 1856 Companies Act, it was essential to give “the greatest publicity to the affairs of such companies, that everyone may know on what grounds he is dealing”. Hence the need for a company register – a public repository for that information.

When companies were by-and-large simple, straightforward things that were the legal embodiment of a bricks-and-mortar establishment and records were kept on paper this was straightforward. The state needed a record of what artificial legal entities it had created, and the public had a right, and a need to access this. In some jurisdictions this creation was performed by local courts; in others the power was delegated to a business register, a ministry of some sort, or, in the case of most US states, the state’s Secretary of State.

Either way, there was usually a central register for this information (although shockingly, and tellingly, Greece still does not have one, still less an open one). The difficulty of understanding what a company was reduced by the simplicity of companies (although there were exceptions) and paper-based records meant that there was largely equality of access for all, and of course increased the costs of companies having an overly complex structure.

Today we’re in a very different place, where it’s common for large ‘corporations’ to be made up of thousands of different legal entities, in scores of different jurisdictions, as our forthcoming hierarchy work, kindly funded by the Sloan Foundation, will show. It’s also common for companies to be set up entirely electronically, within the space of minutes, and for just a few pounds. And it’s common for corporate legal entities to be used to facilitate corruption, organised crime, money laundering, stolen assets and fraud.

In this context, it’s important to go back to the reasons why company registers exist: to be a public record of the creation and existence by the state of artificial entities that should ultimately be for the benefit of the state’s citizens. This is not possible unless “everyone may know on what grounds he is dealing”, and in the 21st century when our lives are not just governed by data, but are data, this means getting the information as free and open data.

Anything else has two negative consequences. First it effectively restricts effective use of the information to those with deep pockets (such as the traditional business information providers), who create rent-seeking business models, restricting innovation, enabling market inefficiencies and providing perverse incentives for complexity and opacity.

Second, in tandem with this it restricts the purpose to which the information can be put. It restricts it to those who can build a business model around it (and the financial crisis is a good example of a situation enabled by data that was used only by those who had the same narrow interest in that data), excluding journalists, civil society, employees, even government itself (which is very data-poor in this area). But it also restricts the ability to do cool things with the data, particularly combining it with other data to do data journalism, analysis and mashups. This, we would argue, is very much not in the interests of society.

Of course some governments can and do charge for access to the data – a shockingly large number, as our reports on access to company data in Open Government Partnership countries and the European Union graphically demonstrated. Governments could charge for a lot of things – in London the fire service was originally a private service run by insurance companies before it was realised that a burning house is likely to damage more than just itself. In fact one of the reasons for governments to exist is to solve collective-action problems, and to provide a base underpinning to society (the rule of law, for example). This is why we don’t charge victims of crime for their cases to be investigated, why we don’t charge for voting, and why, for example, US Federal information is in the public domain.

So why do company registers charge for the information? In some cases, this is due to historical quirks, in some it’s with the misguided idea that just by bringing money in the door they are doing A Good Thing, forgetting that in business it’s not just the top line that matters, it’s the costs too, and these are considerable to society by taking such an approach (which is why an increasing number of governments are starting to realise this by opening up their company data).

In others, it’s something rather more calculating and troublesome. Underlying this is the changing nature of what we mean by a jurisdiction in a highly connected world, given that governments are, in theory at least, bounded by jurisdictions, but global corporations are essentially supra-national, being everywhere and nowhere at once, as the debate about whether BP is a British or a US company (BP plc is domiciled in England, but has more US shareholders, employees and operations in the US).

This creates the opportunity the opportunity for companies to arbitrage jurisdictions and for states to compete with each other to attract a slice of the pie. Now, to a degree there’s nothing wrong with this. Countries compete all the time, investing in education, infrastructure, even immigration to create a beneficial, prosperous and attractive society.

However, there’s a second type of activity, which states sometimes engage in, where they deliberately perform acts which are knowingly and directly at the expense of other states. We’re no experts in this area of geo-politics, but these include things such as industrial espionage, state-backed hacking, even currency manipulation, and these are generally regarded as hostile acts.

Similarly, when a state sets up its corporate law to enrich itself knowing that it will benefit only by impoverishing other states, that too could be constructed as a hostile act. Now this isn’t an article about tax avoidance, transfer pricing, nor about money-laundering and global fraud, so we’re not going to dwell on these aspects.

But there’s a critical point here that relates to company registers. That is that all this behaviour can only be maintained in the shadows, as it is largely indefensible in the bright light of day, and the by-product of this is that such jurisdictions are beloved by criminals, fraudsters, money launderers and crooked politicians. The stories generated by the ICIJ investigation into the British Virgin Islands provide one example, but here’s an even simpler one, taken from forum dedicated to dedicated to “Offshore Company Formation services and Offshore Banking”.

The discussion is about the Seychelles offshore company register, which unlike the the onshore register(which is on the web and searchable) is pretty much entirely opaque, and has very few requirements, one of which, however, is that the companies registered there cannot pursue business within the territory of the Seychelles. They also allow bearer shares (and so the owner can change as easily as moving these around), and have virtually no filing requirements. In many respects, therefore, they are invisible, can’t be tracked, can’t be identified. Some – anti-corruption investigators, those fighting money-laundering, organised crime, fraud etc – may view this with horror, as a charter for any activity, legal and illegal, that you can think of. Others as a green light to do whatever they want:

What is happening here is that company registers are used as tools to sustain country business models that skim off a tiny slice of the money flows that can be diverted via them, via fees and a small – relative to the amount of money, but large for a country its size – industry of corporate lawyers and service agents. The fact that it does damage to others is not just irrelevant, but a requirement of the model, and well understood, as the prohibition of doing business in the home territory shows.

In other words we’re talking about the business model of pirates, operating offshore, but tacitly and not so tacitly supported by the country as long as they don’t attack the home country, and spend a bit of their loot locally.

Finally, this is a game that is unsustainable long-term, as it leads to an inevitable race to the bottom, and in that game there are only a very few winners. It has risks too, as  parasitical behaviour is a difficult balance to strike – risking the parasite either being attacked by the host, or killing it. Already we are seeing disquiet in Europe about the position of Luxembourg, which has gone from the poorest country in the community to the richest, largely through such a business model. And we would wonder how long before Delaware either comes under sustained attack from the other states, or realise that it’s not in their long-term best interests to be associated with the criminal behaviour its opacity enables.

So which company registers perform well, and which perform badly, from a public-purpose perspective? Well, the stand out is the New Zealand company register, which makes everything freely available, without any significant exemptions, and in our dealings with them have been clear in their position as a public register with a public purpose. That’s not to say there are no problems with New Zealand companies, but we suspect that one of the reasons they come to light is the ease of access.

The UK has made some positive moves, and is currently taking the lead in Europe, which, with the exception of Denmark and Norway remains in the dark ages on this (especially Spain, Italy, Germany and Greece). However it has a way to go to live up to David Cameron’s commitment to “shining a light on company ownership, land ownership and where money flows from and to”, particularly releasing the data Companies House holds on shareholders and company financials. It also has not yet taken that critical step of standing back and looking at the company register from a public purpose perspective (and of course its support for opacity jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands is an internal contradiction it has yet to come to terms with).

In the US, none of the states appears to be taking a public lead on this, not even California or New York which might be expected to. In fact, one of the best registries is Alaska, with Texas and Illinois, Nevada and Delaware the worst. 

Latin America, Asia and the developing world is very mixed, but a special shout out should go to Samoa, which has one of the best registers we’ve seen anywhere in the world, and one that puts many of the major countries to shame.

We’re pleased to announce that this weekend we smashed through the 50 million companies mark, with the addition of Thailand, West Virginia and several smaller territories (e.g. Dubai). At last count (it’s changing every hour), we had 50,955,988 companies in 68 jurisdictions. That’s quite an increase on the 3 million in 3 jurisdictions we launched with just two short days ago.

We’ve also been adding more and more directors, and now have over 50 million directorships too (helped in part by the UK’s decision to open up its director information), allowing cross-jurisdictional searches of the key people behind companies. There’s a lot more to come in that area too, so stay tuned.

Finally, we thought we’d give a sneak peak at what’s coming next: corporate networks (aka corporate hierarchies, although in general parent-child and control relationships don’t form a hierarchy by a complex directed cyclic graph). This is a fearsomely complex and difficult area, both making  getting the data and making sense of it, and we’ve been working hard in the background at making sure we do this right.

We’ll be blogging more about this in the future, but for the moment we can share that we’re currently pulling in shareholder data from the New Zealand company register, which sets the gold standard in making this information available, and Alaska, and we’re hoping that other countries will follows suit. You can already see shareholding information on many of the New Zealand company pages (both who are the shareholders and what other companies are owned by the companies), and we’re working on some cool (and useful) visualisations – here’s an early example:

We’re also pulling in subsidiary information from the US Securities & Exchange Commission, although this data is much more difficult, as it’s in whatever format the reporting company decides to provide it in. However, we’ve made good progress and this is what Pearson PLC, owner of the Financial Times looks like bases on its SEC and New Zealand filings:

We’re also adding some serious crowdsourcing functionality, to allow information to be liberated from annual reports, unparseable SEC filings, and other sources. If you’re interesting in being an alpha tester of this (whether you’re an NGO that wants to map corporate relationships of big corporations, companies that want to be transparent about their corporate structures, or just Good People), please email us at info@OpenCorporates.com.

Finally, we should mention that this corporate network work is made possible thanks to a generous grant from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, one of the most prestigious non-profits in the US, and an early backer of Wikipedia and enabler of great projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Looking back over my datajunkie notes, I may only have been using the OpenCorporates API since March of this year (2012; we’re now in December…) but it’s become one of the richest data playgrounds for me, in part because of the far-ranging linking it affords both internally and externally, to other data sources.

Diving into the data for the first time, not even a year ago now, my first thought was to look for something structured that I could use as a warm-up exercise to familiarise myself with the API. Focusing primarily on UK companies, and looking through some of the results for some of the larger UK registered companies, I noticed that (recently registered?) trademark ownership information was available. (Specifically, the company data points to other OpenCorporates data records which include records for trademark registrations).

Included in the OpenCorporates recorded data was a unique WIPO generated identifier for each trademark. A quick websearch revealed that WIPO publishes information about trademarks on from URLs that include the trademark identifier, so I could use the OpenCorporates data – trademarks registered to a particular corporate entity – to draw down additional data from WIPO about particular trademarks. For trademarks that are registered images, this included an image file, so it was a relatively simple exercise to generate a quick sketch of (at least some of) the graphical trademarks registered a particular company.

One thing I noticed in searching for companies on OpenCorporates is that, for the bigger companies at least, there are lots of corporate entities associated with a particular company name. OpenCorporates currently provides an in-part crowd-sourced “community groupings” feature that tries to bundle together different companies that are part of corporate group, but as I poked around the data I noticed that director filings might provide one way of automatically grouping companies. And so I went graph hunting…

The new release of the OpenCorporates API makes it trivial to look up directors, but 6 months or so ago, all we had to hand to was partially structured director filings. It was enough, though, to be able to pull out the directors associated with a particular corporate entity. And having got a list of directors by company, we could do a search around a company with many corporate entities – Tesco, for example – and map out which entities were connected to which by virtue of common director names. Directors’ data is starting to appear as such on OpenCorporates, which makes this sort of mapping easier, although now we are faced with the problem of deciding whether a two directors records sharing the same name are part of the same “director grouping”!

Using network visualisation tools such as Gephi, it’s possible to easily decompose graphs such as these that show connections between companies and directors to a form that just shows co-director links (directors joined by a common company) or potential corporate groupings (companies connected by N or more common directors).

Another possible link between companies was their registered address, so we could also start to explore which similarly named companies might be sharing a physical office. It’s not hard to imagine a time when OpenCorporates will associate geolocation based data with corporate entities, which makes this route to identifying pattern and structure in the data from a geographical, location based perspective a ready possibility.

Revealing the implied structures that are hidden away inside the OpenCorporates database by virtue of common links between corporate entities, directors, and/or locations represents one significant form of value. But there is also much to be gained through linking the OpenCorporates data to other data sources as part of investigations that span datasets. A trivial example is a transparency supporting service that lets us quickly look up (fuzzily, it has to be said!) the directorships of local councillors. Using data from OpenlyLocal, we can pull down a list of councillor names for a particular council, and then look up those names as directors on OpenCorporates. Using open spending data, a further step might be to look up the companies that have received payments over £500 from the same council; and then look to see whether there are any matches.

Whilst preparing for a recent presentation about open data, it struck me that OpenCorporates has the potential to be disruptive in the sense of Clayton Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma”: whilst the data quality may still be lacking in certain respects, OpenCorporates is good enough to use at least as a starting point for certain company related data searches. As the corporate mapping tools evolve, curating corporate groupings (both automatically/heuristically, and via human curators) will become ever easier and ever more accurate. As the director database evolves, I’m sure techniques will emerge for “de-duping” director entities.

The library world may have tools and ideas to help in this respect, for example via the notion of “Virtual International Authority Files” (VIAF), that provide comprehensive, authoritative identifiers for known entities or some of the competing(!?) personal identifier schemes e.g. (Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), both discussed here.). (To a certain extent, the aim of OpenCorporates appears to be the creation of such authority files for corporate entities globally, whatever territory they are registered in.)

An approach that I believe holds much promise is the OpenCorporates Reconciliation API. This provides a clean and efficient way of integrating look-ups to OpenCorporates with data cleansing tools such as OpenRefine. The reconciliation API provides a fuzzy match on a corporate name that returns a set of ranked “possible matches” in the OpenCorporates database and that makes it relatively easy to annotate third party datasets containing company names with OpenCorporates identifiers. This sort of tool may prove invaluable when trying to reconcile council spending data against corporate groupings.

I’m also hopeful for an appearance of a directors reconciliation service…;-)

By continuing to take an open approach to its data, providing robust linking strategies out to other identifier namespaces, in to the OpenCorporates namespace, and within OpenCorporates itself through corporate and director groupings, OpenCorporates can both add value to other services as well as gain value from external enrichment.

In particular, you can now  search the 39 million company directors and officers that OpenCorporates has (with more being added every day).  Here’s an example:

We can now also return XML for those who need this instead of JSON. As part of this, we’re now wrapping all results in a ‘results’ object, and the XML further also wrapped in a Response object. This does mean that the response breaks compatibility with the previous versions but that’s why we’ve had versioning from day one. As developers, we know the pain of having to instantly update a library because the API you’re using doesn’t allow you to specify. version. The version 0.2 documentation has full details.

We’ve also added a new ‘versions’ call, which will return the supported versions as well as the current version. At the moment this returns ['0.1', '0.2'] as the supported versions and 0.1 as the current, default version. We expect to make 0.2 the default version in the next week or so, but the 0.1 will be supported at least until version 0.3 comes out, so if you don’t want to update your code, just specify 0.1. as the required version. Until then, to get the 0.2 API simply specify it in the URL (and in case you wondered, yes, the documentation is now also versioned)

Have fun!

The second, “Corruption, Corporate Transparency & Open Data” examines how the increasing complexity and opacity of the corporate world is providing a fertile ground for corruption, fraud, money laundering and organised crime.

This is fantastic news and moves the UK closer to the fully free situation of New Zealand, for example, and means that OpenCorporates will be soon be including millions of UK directors, to go alongside the more than 20 million directors from the US, New Zealand, and elsewhere.

While it appears that the information will not be available freely as a bulk download (for which there will still be a fee), this is an important step forward, and UK Companies should be congratulated on this further step towards making the Register fully open.

This next week the open data community will be descending on Helsinki for the Open Knowledge Festival, a week-long series of events celebrating open knowledge in all fields.

OpenCorporates is really excited to be presenting here, having previously presented at last year’s OKCON, Open Government Data Camp, not to mention the data.gov/World Bank-organised International Open Government Conference earlier this summer.

We’ve got two main presentations: on Tuesday, we’ll be presenting on the benefits to business of open data in the Open Data in Business session; and on Wednesday we’ll present Corruption, Corporate Transparency & Open Data as part of the Transparency & Accountability strand. This last, which we’re jointly presenting with Global Witness, will be of particular interest to anti-corruption NGOs and also to investigative journalists and data-journalists.

OKFestival is now sold out, but we’ll be posting our presentations online soon after (under an open licence, naturally), and we’ll also be giving a sneak-peak of a new feature that will be critical in in understanding companies. Watch this space…

Last month the US General Accounting Office, produced an excellent report on the use of Dun & Bradstreet’s proprietary DUNS ID system by the Federal Government, specifically the GSA, its procurement and administration arm. In a fairly devastating report, it explains why the ID system was problematic:

• “GSA believes that Dun & Bradstreet effectively has a monopoly for government unique identifiers that has contributed to higher costs.”
• “Due to the proprietary nature of DUNS numbers, Dun & Bradstreet has placed restrictions on how GSA can use DUNS numbers. This limits the purposes for which the government can use the data and hampers the ability to switch to a new numbering system.”
• “DUNS numbers are not subject to transparency requirements such as Freedom of Information Act requests so it is difficult to determine independently the accuracy or comprehensiveness of DUNS information.”

They could also have added that they are highly unsuitable for the open government world which the US, the UK and over 50 over governments have signed up to, or that DUNS numbers do not map to legal entities (for example, every Walmart store has one), or that it requires governments to buy their own data back from D&B with very little value added. Together with the lack of provenance, this makes the system a Black Box of questionable quality, as the government is essentially reduced to taking the entire system (what the DUNS numbers represent, and how they are related) on trust, as a dumb consumer.

Unfortunately, the Federal Government and indeed US government at all levels have integrated the DUNS number at such a deep systematic level that it’s now genuinely difficult to wean itself off them.

As the GAO report explains, “In the event of a change, GSA and dozens of other agencies would have to modify their data systems, replace all DUNS-related data in those systems, and update policies and procedures that refer to DUNS numbers.”

In short, the Federal Government is addicted to the DUNS system, and like an addict that’s been on the crack for years, it’s going to be a tough, hard, long road to wean it off it.  However, it’s not only possible (and the DATA Act offers a possible route out), the alternative is much worse, because every year that it continues on the drug, it becomes more and more dependent, and moves further away from being a functioning member of the open society.

In many respects the US government’s reliance on DUNS numbers is understandable. When they were introduced in 1962, they probably seemed like a great solution to the government – hey, kids, try this; it’s fun, and will make all your problems go away. There is also the fact that in the US, legal entities are created by the individual States, not the Federal government, meaning that until OpenCorporates came along with an IP-free ID system it was difficult to find a common way of identifying them.

The UK government, however, has no such excuse. Not only does is it not some naive youngster, unaware of the problems, just trying it out ‘to see what it’s like‘, it also has a well-functioning system of national legal identifiers, created by its very only Companies House.

In fact, in the Prime Minister’s letter to Cabinet Ministers in July last year, in November last year, he wrote “Unique reference indicators [URIs] to be introduced by DBIS and HMRC beginning in December 2011. These will enable the public to track more easily the interaction between companies and government bodies“. And in fact in October, one month ahead of schedule, Companies House indeed published URIs for companies (disclosure: OpenCorporates was involved in the discussions about these identifiers, and advised on their construction).

In the blog post reporting on those URIs, we asked whether the government would actually use these identifiers (perhaps even using OpenCorporates’ reconciliation service to match the suppliers to the entities), or would it use the DUNS numbering system that was at that point just in limited use in the government?

Well, now we know. Earlier this year (in March, in fact), the government’s procurement service announced that “A new agreement is in place with Dun and Bradstreet for the provision of supplier information.  We are now using DUNS numbers as unique supplier identifiers for managing contracts, spend and supplier relations, simplifying processes and improving effectiveness.“

An example of why this is a problem can be seen from a random enty on the Procurement Service’s supplier list (which, incidentally, unlike the US Federal Central Contractor Register doesn’t appear to be available as open data):

There’s the DUNS Number, right at the top. But how does this enable “the public to track more easily the interaction between companies and government bodies“. This doesn’t help us identify which company Adept Recruitment is (by the way it’s this one), or what type of company it is, and because of the proprietary nature of the DUNS number we can’t even use to to tie other data together.

But more than that, it means the Government Procurement Service probably doesn’t have that information, either. All it has is the DUNS number, and so if it needs anything more (the current status at Companies House, its credit rating, etc), instead of getting that for zero cost (in the case of Companies House) or very low cost (from any one of a number of suppliers), it has to go through Dun & Bradstreet, and pay its mark-up, which can be frankly whatever it wants.

So, was this a typical case of the government’s left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing? Perhaps, although we were warning senior people in the Cabinet Office (which is responsible for both the Government Procurement Service and the government’s Open Data program) back in November that the existing limited use of DUNS numbers was problematic, never mind further integration.

In addition the Prime Minister’s letter and subsequent roll-out of Companies House URIs was pretty clear, and at the very least this would appear to be something the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office should investigate.

Either way, the UK government is well on its way to becoming a full-fledged DUNS number addict, undermining its own open-data policies and leaving future governments with the pain and cost of getting clean.

Following this, Neelie Kroes, the EU Vice-President in charge the Digital Agenda, including open data, tweeted about the report, noting that the 15 EU countries in the OGP didn’t give open access to company data, and wondering how the others performed.

Well, Commissioner Kroes, we’ve answered that question, scoring all 27 EU countries on access to company data, just in time for the EU Digital Agenda Assembly, tomorrow in Brussels. And the results are not good.

But not have only have we published a report similar to the one for Open Government Partnership countries, we’ve also investigated the the particular European-level barriers to that block or hinder access.

The report finds:

• Access to company data in EU countries is very poor, with an average score of just 23 out of 100 points. Though this is slightly better than for Open Government Partnership countries, the OGP figure includes several developing countries without even functioning online company registers.
• Several, including Spain and Austria are completely closed, not even allowing the search for the existence of a company without payment. Others have only the sparsest information shown for free, and Greece has no complete online register.
• There are several EU directives and projects that positively hinder access to company data, and a recent one, on the connection of company registers, threatens to harden the move towards commercialisation of the registers.
• The open data concept has barely touched company registers, with only the UK publishing open company data, while Belgium has said it intends to do so to in the future.

It’s worth putting this into context too. In a time of austerity, it’s significant that two of the countries at the heart of the storm are ones where their citizens can’t even begin to understand the corporate sector, and whether it has disproportionately benefited at the expense of the rest of society, as some have suggested.

We’ll be presenting this report at the Digital Agenda Assembly tomorrow, during the data strand, as it fits in neatly with the Assembly’s objectives, to:

• Assess progress to date on implementation towards the Digital Agenda’s goals and actions and seek ways to improve delivery;
• Identify challenges ahead for the implementation of the Digital Agenda and for the information society in general;
• Mobilise stakeholders’ actions to make further progress and address challenges.

Hopefully after the talk, we’ll see some action.

Well, today, Norway has boosted that average a bit, by becoming the first Open Government Partnership country to publish its company register as data, and so instantly went from 8th to 1st place on our Access to Company Data scoreboard (the UK has committed to publishing its register as open data in July, but has not yet done so. Update: it has now done so too).

We’ve been talking with the Norwegian open data people for quite a while now, and it’s great to see that with their new launch of their open data api, they’ve added the basic company data to it (an API enables two different computers to talk to each other, compared with a scraper, which looks at a web page designed for humans and tries to extract data from it).

That means we can retire the OpenCorporates scraper for Norway (which is good, as scrapers are an intensive and inefficient way of getting the data), and use the API to ensure we’re bang up to date, like the UK and New Zealand, where we also have API access. At the moment, the information returned by the API is pretty basic, with none of the detail that you need to get a full picture of the company (e.g. directors, filings, shareholders), but hopefully this will eventually be made available, putting Norway further in the lead.

Meanwhile, the Belgian Ministry of Finance has announced (English summary) that it is also going to open up its company register as open data too. In the Belgian case, this actually requires a change in the law. More details are expected in the next few weeks.

In both cases this shows not just a commitment by Norway and Belgium to open data, but an understanding that the company registers are critical public registers, essential to the understanding and supervision of companies, which after all are artificial entities given legal personality by the state separate from the owners and managers for the good of society. Let’s hope that some of the bigger European countries follow Norway and Belgium’s important first step in this area.