OpenCorporates is a website which shares data on individual corporate entities under the share-alike attribution Open Database License. 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 in XML or JSON format using a subscription model. 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 was formed by three members: David Eaves, Kaitlin Lee and Andrew Stott. The same team also operate OpenCharities, compiling data on registered charities.
Recognition
In 2011, the site was an award winner in the OpenDataChallenge, 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.
This is the kind of resource the 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. In July 2015, OpenCorporates was a finalist in both the Business and Publisher categories at the Open Data Institute Awards, the only entity to reach the finals in more than one category. At the awards ceremony on 9 July OpenCorporates was announced as the winner of the Open Data Business Award, in recognition of its work with promoting data transparency in the corporate sector. Hera Hussain, Communities and Partnerships Manager at OpenCorporates, said:
We’re delighted and proud to have won this award. When we launched OpenCorporates we had a vision for an open database with tens of millions of companies from all over the world. We’re now in sight of 100 million companies, used regularly by journalists, investigators, governments, even banks. This is a testament not just to the power of OpenCorporates, but of open data itself.
