OpenCorporates hits 20 million companies, an open data milestone

The following is a guest post from Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data

Less than eight months ago, OpenCorporates : The Open Database Of The Corporate World launched with the rather ambitious goal of creating a URL for every company in the world. Five months later, it had already reached 10 million companies. And now, barely 3 months after that, it has doubled that to over 20 million companies.

In that time, OpenCorporates has:

Added important countries such as Spain and, today, Ireland (we’re still importing the Irish data, and reckon there’s probably something under 100,000 still to go)
Added a way of grouping companies together, linked to the Wikipedia (and DBpedia) entries, and thus made the job of mapping out multinationals feasible for the first time
Started collecting information on statutory filings (we now have over 40 million)
Improved the Google Refine reconciliation service for matching company names to the likely legal entities.
Shown concrete examples of how OpenCorporates can be used cleaning up broken government data
Won an award at the European Open Data Challenge

OpenSpending is already using OpenCorporates‘s Google Refine reconciliation service, and using the resultant open URIs OpenCorporates to identify the recipients of UK government spending, and we expect this collaboration to get even closer as OpenCorporates and OpenSpending add more data, and more countries.

Not made for a self-funded micro-startup (and, of course, the open data community, without which it wouldn’t have been possible).

So join us in celebrating this milestone, and help us make sure the biggest and best database of company information in the world is an openly licensed one by tweeting about OpenCorporates, +1’ing us, liking us on Facebook, and above all linking to us.