For any participants participating in the Open Government Partnership Summit in London tomorrow – 30th October. Join us for a training session on how to work with company data.

What’s special about companies data?

Company data is tricky, it’s often hard to determine who exactly the companies in corporate databases are.

As Amrit Naresh from OpenOil explains:

“People don’t usually don’t talk in the language of official jurisdictions and corporate identifier numbers. It’s common to say that ‘X’ has done this terrible thing or ‘Y’ did that, but without knowing exactly which X or Y entity (with the full name and the corporate registration number) did it, it’s impossible to know who exactly is responsible. Another example would be the case of a company like A*, which has a contract with Nigeria’s state oil company. But is it A* Energy International PLC (registration # abc) which signed the contract, or is it A* Energy PLC (registration # xyz)? Each company may have an entirely different corporate track record or top level personnel. The media rarely reports the full names and corporate identifiers of companies involved in transactions, so it’s difficult to know which entity exactly is being discussed.”

Open Corporates Training.

What we’ll cover

• How to discover and report accurately on which company is being referred to
• What is beneficial ownership and how can you research it using OpenCorporates – a powerful tool for investigating companies
• Researching networks of companies: particularly co-directors look at co-director networks
• The new network exploration tools in OpenCorporates

When: 10.45-12.45
Where: Floor 5 festival area
Link: See more details.

Can’t make it?

We’ll publish slides and a writeup from the event shortly. Watch this space.

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