Ontotext’s expertise in Linked Open Data (LOD) has helped OpenCorporates – the world’s largest open database of companies – to incorporate the Bulgarian Trade Register into its extensive company dataset.
OpenCorporates has recently unveiled its new jurisdiction, Bulgaria, which adds about 970,000 new entities to its open dataset of more than 140 million companies worldwide. Now, it includes the full output from the Bulgarian Trade Register available as open data XML files under a permissive CC-0 public domain license.
Ontotext has assisted OpenCorporates in understanding the Bulgarian Trade Register, which – from both a technical and legislative perspective – was a difficult task. The main challenges involved understanding the schema and interpreting the data. For example, a lot of the data was recorded in Cyrillic, which required manually mapping it to ISO standard jurisdiction codes, etc.
Some of the initial efforts started at the Datathon data analysis competition in March last year. The winning team worked on two cases: (1) “Hacking” the Bulgarian Commercial Register (a case provided by Ontotext), and (2) Analyzing and exploring data about public procurement in Bulgaria (a case provided by the Open Data portal of Bulgaria’s government). The team decided to join the two datasets to generate a Linked Open Data dataset in RDF, which then to query and analyze inside Ontotext’s semantic graph database GraphDB.
Thanks to the significant information about Bulgarian companies, officers, filings, industry codes and branches, Bulgaria now ranks 3rd in the world in the Open Company Data Index, behind only Denmark and the United Kingdom. Open company data for our country gets the highest possible scores for freely searchable data, freely available data, open licensing and data including company directors.
With its comprehensive expertise in Linked Open Data, Ontotext has been helping dataset providers develop elaborate data models and make better sense of complex data about companies.
As such, Ontotext plays a key role in the EU-funded euBusinessGraph project, which aims to create a platform that integrates, harmonizes and publishes data about European companies. The outcomes of this project will improve company and public sector efficiency and competitiveness. Ontotext has a key role in developing, running and hosting the euBusinessGraph Marketplace and Services.
Sign up to view a recording of our recent webinar Graph Analytics on Company Data and News led by Ontotext CEO Atanas Kiryakov and check out some of the Q&As from it.
For more information, contact Doug Kimball, Chief Marketing Officer at Ontotext