This post is the part of a weekly blogpost series 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)
This week, we scraped business licenses from Washington and Alaska. Shyam also worked on the company fetcher for Australia and Uganda. We’ve also reindexed all company records to speed up search functionality within opencorporates and experimented with a way to keep business licenses up-to-date with minimal footprint.
Bots submitted by community members…. from Peter Evans.
We’ve got Quentin who is scraping data from the Central Bank of Montenegro.
Dinotash is continuing his epic bot writing by working with me to get his scrapers running on Turbot – at the moment we’re working on Argentine financial licences from the Central Bank of Argentina – these are the licences with so much information they take up approximately 1MB of JSON for many records. We’re also working on cleaning up some data for Slovakia which was spread across PDF files, some of which we cannot parse at the moment, and financial licences from the Swedish FSA which is quite a big dataset, circa 25000 records. Dinotash is currently working on properly assigning the home jurisdiction of foreign entities, possibly with us adding support for a geocoding library.
Do you want to join the fun and claim an Open Data mission? Here’s what Peter suggests.
EASY : Write a bot for Finance Licences (securities) – Costa Rica
MEDIUM : Write a bot for Finance Licences (securities) – Securities And Exchange Commission (thailand)’
HARD : Write a bot for financial licenses for Ireland
Campaign & Community Update – #MaptheBanks … from Hera & Seb.
We’re speaking to our community members for the next two weeks and have lots of exciting things coming up soon. We’ve taken the Easter break to refuel and do a second push for #MaptheBanks. If you’re interested in helping out, then help us recruit more developers in volunteering their time to scrape.
Here’s a tweet you can use:
“Calling all developers! Join #MaptheBanks campaign to increase transparency in the financial industry. mapthebanks.com #opendata”
Our Slack experiment is also going really well so if you want to be part of our community and get live feedback on bots, data sources or just complain about PDFs – request an invite by emailing hera@opencorporates.com
The next #FlashHacks is…
London, 29th April, 5-10pm >> Join Us!
Berlin, 29th April, 5-10pm >> Join Us!
Nottingham, 8th May, 4.30 – 8pm >> Join Us!
Want to host your own #FlashHacks? Get in touch hera@opencorporates.com .
Tweet of the Week
What else?
- We’ve got some pretty amazing rollouts for the API coming out soon.
- The team is really excited to welcome Lukas (Software Engineer) & Rob (Product Manager) to OpenCorporates next week!
- Peter Evans bought a gigantic chocolate bean bag on the recommendation of Hera and is finding it really good to work from.
- Peter has been practising his poker face for a charity poker tournament tomorrow.
- Seb is really amused and impressed by Peter Evan’s custom Emoji making ability.
- Shyam found something interesting to share:
“Lexophile” is a term used to describe those who are clever with words, such as “you can tune a piano but you can’t tuna fish” , or “to write with a broken pencil is pointless.” A competition to see who can come up with the best lexphillies is held every year in Dubuque, Iowa. The year’s winning submissions: … A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months. - Hera(me) is looking forward to watching the Book of Mormon this weekend!
blog.opencorporates.com 