In Germany, the incorporation of companies (and subsequent changes) is handled not by a central register, but by district courts (‘Amtsgerichts’) – in fact by around 150 such courts (out of a total 600). Unfortunately the identifiers each court issues are neither unique to that court, nor to Germany...
Raleigh, NC – February 14th, 2019 – LexisNexis® Legal & Professional, a leading provider of information and analytics, and OpenCorporates the largest open database of companies in the world, are today announcing a new collaboration which adds OpenCorporates legal entity data to the Nexis® Data as a Service portfolio.
You might have noticed that last week OpenCorporates launched the German company data. Bringing in the German company data was a mammoth task, as we've already started writing about – and we’ll be publishing more blog posts about the precise details of this in the near future.
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…
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…
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…
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.