Tag Archives: corporations

What makes a good company register? Part 1: The public purpose

This is the first in a series of posts on company registers – why they exist, what they should do, and how they should do it, based on OpenCorporates’ interactions with over 70 of them. Over the past six months, … Continue reading

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Announcing version 0.2 of the OpenCorporates API

We’re pleased to announce the new version of our API (version 0.2), with some significant enhancements and improvements. In particular, you can now  search the 39 million company directors and officers that OpenCorporates has (with more being added every day).  Here’s … Continue reading

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Corruption, corporate transparency, open data & business models: OKFest presentations

For those who weren’t able to make the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, here are OpenCorporates‘ two presentations. The first was Open Data: What’s In It For Business? and focuses on how businesses can get benefit from publishing open data, and … Continue reading

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Access to EU company data is very poor, Neelie

Two months ago, OpenCorporates published our ground-breaking report on access to company data in Open Government Partnership countries. The results were not good, with an average score of just 21 out of 100. Following this, Neelie Kroes, the EU Vice-President in … Continue reading

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Towards a global lookup service for corporate ids

We’ve often stated that the goal of OpenCorporates is simple (but huge): to create an openly licensed database containing every corporate legal entity in the world, and provide open URI ids for them. We base this URI on the ID issued … Continue reading

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How open is company data in Open Government Partnership countries?

Today, the day before the Open Government Partnership meeting starts in Brasilia, OpenCorporates is publishing a major new report into access to company data in OGP countries, and the picture is not good. Out of a total of a possible 100 … Continue reading

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Corporate confidentiality, company relationships, and why this ‘competitive advantage’ is anti-competitive

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 … Continue reading

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Major milestones: 40m companies, 50+ jurisdictions, moving out of alpha, getting respectable

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 … Continue reading

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OpenCorporates: The directors’ cut

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 … Continue reading

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3 reasons why the EU’s new Business Vocabulary is so important

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 … Continue reading

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