Discover German Company Data at Open Data Day 2019 – Berlin Edition

Interested in German company data? You need to come to the Open Data Day this Saturday, March 2, in Berlin...

Wait, what? The problems of company numbers in Germany (and how we’re handling them)

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...

What the German company data tells us so far

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.

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 →

Germany: Do not let ‘personal security’ be the bait and switch for public accountability

Written by Chris Taggart and Hera Hussain When the announcement of a public beneficial ownership register in Germany was made in November 2016, it was welcomed by the transparency community and investigative journalists. True, it wasn’t going to be free, still less open data, but it was a significant step for a country that has … Continue reading Germany: Do not let ‘personal security’ be the bait and switch for public accountability →