[open-government] Retrieval of company revenues

Mon Jun 3 17:35:15 UTC 2013

Following on from what Dan said, pretty much every company register in the
world issues identifiers for each company (read this old post on Sunlight's
blog <http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/11/15/30018/> and this one on
DUNS numbers<http://blog.opencorporates.com/2012/07/24/are-duns-numbers-the-crack-cocaine-of-id-systems-and-is-the-uk-the-latest-addict/>for
some of the wider issues).

OpenCorporates <http://OpenCorporates.com> uses these in its URIs so
doesn't add any IP. There are lots of proprietary ones out there (DUNS,
Bloomberg etc), but they are all problematic from a quality and a legal
perspective. You can use the OpenCorporates format even if we don't have
the jurisdiction yet, and when we do, you know you'll be able to link to
it, or use something similar (and if we do, as Dan mentioned you can use
our Google Refine reconciliation API). If you're wanting to do anything in
the open space just don't use proprietary IDs, as it will undermine both
the argument and any open licence you use.

Re the financials, the problem is that many jurisdictions don't collect
this information as data (i.e it's in PDFs) or don't collect it at all. So
you're left with proprietary solutions. Then it's just a question of who
has the best price/data/licence. But again, you have have issues with
derived data licences. Or you could help open this data up for the wider
world ; -)

Re financials vocabularies XBRL is the de facto standard.

Hope this helps

Chris Taggart
Co-founder

-------------------------------------------------------
OpenCorporates :: The Open Database of the Corporate World
http://opencorporates.com
Blog: http://blog.opencorporates.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/OpenCorporates

OpenCorporates is published by Chrinon Ltd, a company dedicated to
improving and publishing public data under an open licence that allows and
encourages reuse, including commercially. Registered in England, number
07444723.

On 3 June 2013 16:21, Dan <daniel at ohuiginn.net> wrote:

>
> 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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>
>
>
>
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