[open-government] Retrieval of company revenues

[Dan]

It will depend a lot on which country these companies are registered in.
If they're in the Cayman Islands, for instance, you won't find much;)
>From the little I know of the Swiss system, much of the information is
decentralized, and so awkward to access.

> - is it a kind of standard format (unique identifier) to identify a
> company ? If I had to implement that, what would be the best way to do
> this ?

In most jurisdictions, yes. But there is no open standard for these
across different countries.

The most common system is the DUNS number
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Universal_Numbering_System). But this
is controlled by one company which provides company data on a commercial
basis, so it's preferable to avoid it where possible.

You can try using the opencorporates reconciliation API to get their
standard ID for a company. This will help map from free text to a
company identifier, and will get you a link to the official company
registry in many countries. See
http://api.opencorporates.com/documentation/Home

As for getting financial information: it depends. For UK companies it is
available in (paid) company filings. Duedil.com make it available for
free, but their API costs several thousand pounds per month. I'm not
aware of good free global data sources on revenues; if you find any, I
would be glad to hear about them.

best,
Dan

-- 
Dan O'Huiginn
Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

daniel at ohuiginn.net
http://ohuiginn.net @danohu
http://reportingproject.net

On 03/06/13 16:42, Antoine Logean wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> In a project we have to solve the following problem:
> 
> We have a long list of company names and we would like to retrieve for
> each company the annual revenue. As it is a pretty straight forward
> information that can be useful in many different context, I imagine that
> there are already such existing resources/services.
> 
> For companies that are on the stocks market I could use yahoo Finance,
> Google finance or MSM money.
> 
> The problem start by private companies. As they are not on the stock
> market, they do not have the obligation to share financial data as
> public companies and the information they share is not consistent or
> regulated. Here I have found some existing services like
>  
> - http://www.manta.com
> - http://www.hoovers.com
> - http://www.mergentonline.com
> 
> As I do not want to re-invent the wheel, I would have the following
> questions:
> 
> - is it a kind of standard format (unique identifier) to identify a
> company ? If I had to implement that, what would be the best way to do
> this ?
> - is there an existing open company index/register that aggregate
> various economical information about companies ?
> - is there already RDF vocabularies existing to describe such economical
> information about companies ?
> 
> I would be interested in any information, links & hints that could help
> me to solve this problem.
> 
> Thanks in advance for your help.
> 
> Kind regards
> 
> Antoine Logean
> -- 
> 
> Opendata.ch - Enabling Open Government Data in Switzerland 
> Antoine Logean | Founding Board Member | Community & Communication FR 
> +41 79 3518482 | antoine.logean at opendata.ch <mailto:antoine.logean at opendata.ch> | http://twitter.com/ecolix
> 
> 
> 
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