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OpenCorporates

OpenCorporates
Created by Chris Taggart, Rob McKinnon and community
Website opencorporates.com
Launched 20 December 2010; 6 years ago (2010-12-20)
Content license
Open Database Licence

OpenCorporates is a website which shares data on corporate entities as open data under the share-alike attribution Open Database Licence. It was created by Chris Taggart and Rob McKinnon, under the auspices of their company, Chrinon Ltd, and launched on 20 December 2010. It has the aims of creating a URL with such data for every corporate entity in the world, importing government data relating to companies and matching it to specific companies.

The site also shows groups of companies which are legally part of the same conglomerate. Basic company information is available as open data in XML or JSON format.

The OpenCorporates Advisory Board exists to advise OpenCorporates on policy, practice and principles, and to ensure that OpenCorporates remains true to its central mission of the opening of company data for the public good. It's formed by three members actually: David Eaves, Kaitlin Lee and Andrew Stott.

The same team also operate OpenCharities, compiling data on registered charities.

In 2011, the site was an award winner in the OpenDataChallenge (3rd Prize App), whose judging panel included web founder Tim Berners-Lee and Laura Creighton, who said:

This is an incredibly powerful and useful app. It combines information collected by scraping the web with Open Data from government bodies, with a new feature for crowdsourcing. It makes accessing government information about companies trivial. This tool is invaluable for those who want to find out more about what it is that corporations are doing. It is a remarkable step forward for transparency and accountability. I could play with this thing for days.

In launching the competition, Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission said of the site:

This is the kind of resource the (Digital) Single Market needs and it is encouraging to see that it is being built.

The project was subsequently represented on the European Union's Core Vocabularies Working Group's Core Business Task Force.

In early 2012, the project was appointed to the Financial Stability Board's advisory panel on a Legal Entity Identification for Financial Contracts.


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