The largest open database of companies in the world
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.
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
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!
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
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.
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.
This is the third in a series of data-focused blog posts explaining what goes on behind the scenes when we bring a new jurisdiction into OpenCorporates.
