What is your role at OpenCorporates? I run the data team at OpenCorporates and so I am responsible for all of our data. This encompasses the sourcing of information from local registries, ensuring we understand the data and any quality issues, and transforming it to our standardised datasets which are used by our public benefit … Continue reading Meet Rebecca Lee, Chief Data Officer
Here at OpenCorporates, we really care about official company data – and getting this data right means we need to know a lot about the nature of legal entities, what a company is, and what its legal personality actually means, particularly in a world where companies are ever increasing in number, speed and complexity. Every … Continue reading A brief history of shell companies: must read for company data wonks
For the past 50 years, companies, regulators, investigators and journalists have mostly used ‘Black Box’ data - data that is opaque, not well defined, uses proprietary identifiers, and has poor data quality feedback loops. But continued reliance on this data could put a firm out of business within five years, according to a new report by OpenCorporates.
In the midst of the news of the German company data, you might have missed this blog post by Anti-Money Laundering expert Graham Barrow. It’s a great blog, and one that we think shows how OpenCorporates is a key part of the workflow of anyone investigating companies – so we’re cross posting it here too. While … Continue reading Guest Blog: A Day in the Life of an Amateur Money Laundering Investigator
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.
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.
We’re constantly carrying out work that helps improve & enhance the quality and depth of our company data. Some of our recent small changes don’t warrant a full blog post, so here are some newsworthy updates that we’ve made recently.
OpenCorporates is proud to announce our latest feature, global industry codes! While we’ve long collected data for industry codes for a number of jurisdictions (including the UK, France, Norway, even a few US states), we recently finished mapping multiple industry codes to the UN’s international standard for such codes, ISIC (Revision 4).
We live in a corporate world – companies are involved with everything we do, yet the disparity between the availability of personal and company information is striking. We see the timeline of significant (and not so significant) events of our friends in social network feeds every day. Yet it’s extraordinarily difficult to do the same for the companies that we work for, buy from, do business with, help craft our laws via lobbying, and generally influence our lives in multiple ways.
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