This post is the first of a weekly blogpost updating you on what’s going on at OpenCorporates this week. Want to help us get more data? Claim a mission!
Data the OpenCorporates team is scraping…. from the Data team (Peter & Shyam)
Business licenses. Business licenses are interesting because they contain information about business activities and may have information like trading names and addresses. This week, we found 10 data sources for US states & scraped scraped business licenses from Minnesota, Montana, West Virginia and Alabama.
Bots submitted by community members…. from Peter Evans.
biibii has submitted a neat Financial Licenses scraper for the Central Bank of Uruguay while Geza (infinitary) is submitting a great scraper which is about the licensed branches of foreign banks from Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), which includes transforming home city of the branch to home jurisdiction. biibii is also working on Malawi and Australia – Australia particularly will be a big dataset & a very hard website to scrape
Star scraper of the week: Stefan (ODI) got his scraper right the first time! The scraper extracts all Authorised Bank & Securities Dealers from Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA),
Do you want to join the fun and claim an Open Data mission? Here’s what Peter suggests.
MEDIUM : Write a bot for financial licenses (various) of Lithuania
MEDIUM : Write a bot for financial licenses – pensions & insurance authority of Zambia
HARD : Write a bot for financial licenses (banking) for Sudan
Campaign & Community Update – #MaptheBanks … from Hera & Seb.
Map the Banks has been keeping us busy. 95 missions have been claimed out of approximately 200! We still have quite a few missions up for grabs. We’ve had a 3 #FlashHacks for it, one in Zurich and two in London. And, you’ll be happy to read that there is a #FlashHacks event coming up in Madrid and Berlin next month.
If you’re interested in helping us with analysing the data, join our Google group! We’re also on the hunt for guest bloggers interested in talking about open data, transparency and company data. Sound like you? Sign up.
Events we are attending & speaking at….
None this week but lots happening next week.
Know of any event we should be going to?
The next #FlashHacks is…
London, 25th February, 5-10pm >> Join Us!
Want to host your own #FlashHacks? Get in touch hera@opencorporates.com .
Tweet of the Week
What else?
- Peter, our lead Ruby/Python programmer is hating computers and wants to retrain as a tree surgeon, perhaps because he’s spent some of his spare time this week removing some large laurel bushes from the bottom of his garden. He’s found the destruction cathartic, and is looking forward to planting some fruit bushes.
- Hera (me!) is embarking on a course to learn Arabic. Why not? I can already read it and understand 10% of it.
- Chris is happy not to be travelling for a few days.
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