[Open-companies] Hello!

Thu Sep 1 22:16:30 UTC 2011

Kaitlin

Great to hear from you, and looking forward to seeing you at OGD. Have a
look at OpenCorporates.com as a starting point, which use the company
numbers issued by the company registries to form an open id/URI -- unlike
the proprietary DUNS number for example. Both Ellen and Tom Lee have said
nice things about OpenCorporates.

The IDs (and the Google Refine reconciliation service) are already being
used by OpenSpending, and so are a good start, and we've already got 9 US
states, and should be importing California in the next couple of weeks.

There are of course other ID problems still to be solved -- from
non-corporate entities (do PACs fall into that category?) to unincorporated
bodies, e.g. unlimited partnerships to IDs for government bodies. There's
also the question of mapping other ID systems to the legal identifiers, and
other data, and would be really helpful to get your take on this.

Kind regards

Chris
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------
OpenCorporates :: The Open Database of the Corporate World
http://opencorporates.com
OpenlyLocal :: Making Local Government More Transparent
http://openlylocal.com
Blog: http://countculture.wordpress.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/CountCulture

On 1 September 2011 22:28, Kaitlin Lee <klee at sunlightfoundation.com> wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>
> I just signed up to attend OGD Camp and am particularly interested in the
> workshop on organization identifiers. Jonathan Gray suggested I join this
> list to stay up to date on the topic. I'm a web developer/researcher at the
> Sunlight Foundation in the US and have mostly worked on projects regarding
> federal spending, including:
>
> Subsidyscope, a database of federal Subsidies: http://subsidyscope.com
> Clearspending, a data quality analysis of the US' federal spending portal,
> USASpending.gov: http://clearspending.com (going to relaunch with new data
> in a week or two)
>
> These projects made it pretty clear that without unique corporate
> identifiers it's very difficult to track spending accurately. There are
> several proprietary systems here and none of them function that well. I'm
> psyched to see what you guys are up to at OGD camp!
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Kaitlin Lee
> Web Developer, SubsidyScope.com | Sunlight Foundation
> 202-742-1520 x247 | @kaitlinblee
>
> _______________________________________________
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> open-companies at lists.okfn.org
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>
>
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