Correspondence with Open Corporates (March 2017)

[C21Beancounter]

Below is a summary of email correspondence between Open Corporates and myself during March 2017. It may be of use to those with interests in Wikidata and Business/Corporate repositories.

(1) Wikidata

Background: Open Corporate’s Impact page states that the "excellent folk at Wikidata have been experimenting with automatically matching companies in OpenCorporates to the companies in their database".

Question: Could you "push" data from your database onto Wikidata? Is that what you are intending to do in future? [NB: this issue was triggered from a discussion between myself and Antonin - see Issue #5]

Answer: I don't believe that it's something we've recently considered. In previous conversations with Wikidata folk, it was thought that our data was too low-level to refer to a broader company grouping like, say "Microsoft" (see related discussion here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P1320 ). Having said that we would consider syndicating limited data to Wikidata, probably limited to just company identifier and name.

(2) FCA’s Mutual Societies Data

Background: FCA website contains information about reproduction of materials found on its website (mostly relating to copyright: https://www.fca.org.uk/legal). If you want a copy of the database -split between a list of all registered or all deregistered Mutual Societies- each report will cost £12.. [NB: Peter M-R has helpfully pointed out that facts are uncopyrightable - European Database Directive applies to databases.].

Question: What legal protections does OC use that enable you to publish FCA’s data freely?

Answer: We're effectively following these T&Cs regarding the mutuals data: http://web.archive.org/web/20150726234126/http://www.fca.org.uk/firms/firm-types/mutual-societies/expect/terms. Note that this webpage has since been taken offline by the FCA, however it makes reference to "The FCA will aim to make all public domain information available in line with relevant legislation". There are generally no restrictions on re-use of public domain information (which is the data that does not incur a fee).

(3) My Mutual Societies dataset

Background: Because of the FCA copyright issue, I am currently attempting to create a [workaround] dataset of UK mutual societies by combining various open datasets. [I outlined some of the sources – various public sector registries and those of other civil society organisations e.g. Coops UK.]

Question: Would OC be interested in using my dataset?

Answer: We usually obtain data directly from the primary, public sources, rather than from 3rd parties, primarily so we can provide provenance to the public record. The data also has to tie in with our mission of providing core company data. [OC may now consider using Coop UK’s dataset as a source about unincorporated associations.]

(4) Other matters

Question: Do you supply a list of all the Official Registers you use?

Answer: For companies: https://opencorporates.com/registers. For other datasets: http://missions.opencorporates.com/datasets