Guest blog: Wer, wie, was – why Germany needs an open corporate register and open contracting

This week, OpenCorporates launched over 5 million companies from Germany, marking our 130th jurisdiction. This is a guest blog post by Georg Neumann, Senior Manager of Communications and Engagement at Open Contracting Partnership, on why we need open contracting data too. Read the original version of this blog in German here. A large portion of the German … Continue reading Guest blog: Wer, wie, was – why Germany needs an open corporate register and open contracting →

Creating the German open company data: how we did it

Since we launched the dataset of over 5 million German companies earlier this week, we’ve had lots of questions about how we assembled the data. This post aims to answer that question. It’s obviously quite detailed and technical, but we hope it will be of interest to a technical audience at least.

Press release: German company data must be available as open data

Yesterday, we announced the German company data is now in OpenCorporates. For the record, here’s the press release announcing it. Please feel free to distribute widely. Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash EU Horizon 2020 The collection of the German company data has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No … Continue reading Press release: German company data must be available as open data →

German company data now available for download via Open Knowledge Deutschland!

Yesterday, OpenCorporates added 5 million German companies and over 4 million associated officers from the official German company gazette notices and register. As well as being an important jurisdiction in itself, this was one of the most challenging jurisdictions we’ve added, due to underlying data quality issues and the lack of structure in the gazettes … Continue reading German company data now available for download via Open Knowledge Deutschland! →

German company data now open for all

OpenCorporates is proud to announce that it has today added German company data, making this the 130th jurisdiction and one of the largest single jurisdictions. The German data adds over 5 million companies to the OpenCorporates database. This was a huge project for us, for a number of reasons: There are significant problems with the … Continue reading German company data now open for all →

OpenCorporates and OCCRP sign landmark Memorandum of Understanding to power anti-corruption investigations

We're delighted to announce that last week we signed a Memorandum of Understanding to supply our data in bulk to the superb Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. This will allow OpenCorporates' data to appear on their Investigative Dashboard platform, and also for OCCRP to use our trusted, high-quality legal entity data in their important and groundbreaking investigations, such as the Russian Laundromat.

Policy Paper: how OpenCorporates handles company number problems

Company numbers are identifiers issued by corporate registers to give certainty and clarity to legal entity information. When they are well-designed they are unique, persistent and unambiguous. The reason they are so important is that companies change their names relatively frequently, and legal names are even reused, meaning that such identifiers are the only way of categorically identifying legal entities.

European company data to go open (probably)

Great news – it looks as if Europe is taking a huge step forward for corporate transparency and open data with the new Public Sector Information directive.

Meet Our Trustees: Giannina Segnini

Coming up second in a series of interviews with our trustees is Giannina Segnini, one of the best known names in data journalism. Giannina is Director of the Master of Science Data Journalism Program at the Journalism School at Columbia University, New York. Until February 2014, Segnini headed a team of journalists and computer engineers at La Nacion, Costa Rica’s newspaper. Her team processed the data and developed the interactive application for the OffshoreLeaks project, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2013. Segnini also actively participates in ICIJ’s Panama Papers project.

Behind the collapse: The real cost of Bitcoin’s fall from grace… and how to investigate companies using the OpenCorporates API

Just before Christmas, Sky News released a fascinating report that found at least 340 companies related to cryptocurrencies or blockchain were dissolved or liquidated in 2018, compared to 139 in the previous year. The investigation was conducted by analysing data from Companies House and OpenCorporates. Want to find out how they did it? Read this … Continue reading Behind the collapse: The real cost of Bitcoin’s fall from grace… and how to investigate companies using the OpenCorporates API →