[euopendata] Building a global database the open, distributed way

[Chris Taggart]

Not sure what the best way to do this is, but thought this was very
relevant for the list: please to announce a new collaboration between
OpenCorporates.com, The Open Database of the Corporate World, and
ScraperWiki, to accelerate the building of OpenCorporates' global
database of companies, especially to many more European companies.

We've linked up with ScraperWiki to make it easy for the open data
community to add jurisdictions not yet covered by writing scrapers.
We're even offering bounties to do it, with £100 for each new
territory added (often the scrapers will taken less than a couple of
hours to write), with £250 for target territories such as Australia
and France.

This means not only can far more territories be added to
OpenCorporates' openly licensed database, but that the open data
community can be rewarded for doing what it enjoys most – opening up
previously inaccessible data. And because neither the scrapers nor the
data belong to OpenCorporates, both can be reused for other purposes,
or used to build other applications.

An example is the sample scraper written by OpenCorporates to open up
the Isle of Man company register.

There's more details on the blog post at:
http://opencorporates.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/building-a-global-database-the-open-distributed-way/

Chris
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OpenCorporates :: The Open Database of the Corporate World
http://opencorporates.com
Blog: http://countculture.wordpress.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/CountCulture