Business Research: "OpenCorporates Hits 20 Million Companies, an Open Data Milestone"

From the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog:

Less than eight months ago, OpenCorporates : The Open Database Of The Corporate World launched with the rather ambitious goal of creating a URL for every company in the world. Five months later, it had already reached 10 million companies. And now, barely 3 months after that, it has doubled that to over 20 million companies.

In that time, OpenCorporates has:

• Added important countries such as Spain and, today, Ireland (we’re still importing the Irish data, and reckon there’s probably something under 100,000 still to go)
• Added a way of grouping companies together, linked to the Wikipedia (and DBpedia) entries, and thus made the job of mapping out multinationals feasible for the first time
• Started collecting information on statutory filings (we now have over 40 million)
• Improved the Google Refine reconciliation service for matching company names to the likely legal entities.
• Shown concrete examples of how OpenCorporates can be used cleaning up broken government data
• Won an award at the European Open Data Challenge

Direct to OpenCorporates Database

Read the Complete Blog Post

See Also: “Introducing a new list just for open data on companies” (via OKFN Blog)

Filed under: Awards, Data Files, News