euBusinessGraph (Enabling the European Business Graph for Innovative Data Products and Services) aims to create a platform that integrates, harmonizes and publishes data related to European companies in order to improve company and public sector efficiency and competitiveness.
Six important business cases are identified: detecting company events (e.g. change in management), identifying calls for tenders, integrating company information in CRMs, creating a European companies knowledge base, creating a Norwegian national registry, and facilitating data journalism. The project brings innovation in providing language-independent identifiers, relevant corporate events in various languages, multilingual annotation services, cross-border data coverage, and reduced cost for accessing and reusing data.
Contact: Milena Yankova
Project Overview
Corporate information, including basic company firmographics (e.g., name(s), incorporation data, registered addresses, ownership and related entities), financials (e.g., balance sheets, ratings) as well as contextual data (e.g., cadastral data on corporate properties, geo data, data about directors and shareholders, public tenders data, press mentions) are the foundation that many data value chains are built on. Furthermore, this type of information contributes to the transparency and accountability of enterprises, is instrumental input to the process of marketing and sales, and plays a key role in many business interactions.
Existing initiatives to increase the interoperability and access of corporate data are mostly fragmented (across borders), limited in scope and size, and silo-ed within specific business communities with limited accessibility from outside their originating sectors and countries. As a result, collecting and aggregating data about a business entity from several public sources (be it private/public, official or non-official ones), and especially across country borders and languages is a tedious, time consuming, error prone, and very expensive operation which renders many potential business models non-feasible.
euBusinessGraph represents a key initiative to simplify and disrupt the cross-border and cross-lingual collection, reconciliation, aggregation, and provisioning and analytics of company-related data from authoritative and non-authoritative public or private sector sources, with the aim of enabling cross-sectorial innovation. By a combination of large companies, SMEs, public organizations, and technology transfer providers, euBusinessGraph sets the foundations of a European cross-border and cross-lingual “business graph”, aggregating, linking, and provisioning (open and non-open) high-quality company-related data, demonstrating innovation across sectors where company-related data value chains are relevant.
Ontotext’s Role
Ontotext has a key role in developing, running and hosting the euBusinessGraph Marketplace and Services. These services are based on S4, Ontotext’s cloud-based semantic software platform. This includes the following tasks:
- Provide a reliable hosting service for the business graph. It is based on the Ontotext S4 semantic graph (triplestore) database-as-a-service, integrated into and deployed as part of the DataGraft platform. The hosting task covers improvements of the scalability, performance and reliability of a large number of semantic graph databases (triplestores) running in the Cloud, so that large volumes of data can be managed and simultaneous queries and data access requests can be supported. The hosted datasets are accessible to third-party applications via various standard data access mechanisms: SPARQL query and Linked Data endpoints, as well as various RESTful APIs.
- Ensure the availability of a data brokerage system in the form of a data marketplace where data that are part of the business graph can be provisioned and accessed. The focus is on the implementation of a mechanism for controlled access to business graph data, together with services for user management and data access mechanisms. In addition, this task addresses the operational services needed for the marketplace. Creating components for platform monitoring, availability, administration, quota enforcement, branding and billing. This task also packages services developed by other partners, provisioning a unifying offering to users of the business graph data.
Ontotext also participates in ontology engineering and semantic data modeling, leveraging its expertise with large organization databases such as Global Legal Entity Identifier and Dun & Bradstreet. This includes the following:
- System of Identifiers for Corporate-related Data and Entities: support linking data between entities in different countries and across multilingual barriers, and serve as the core mechanism for linking data for the business cases, and the creation of the business graph.
Core aspects that are addressed in this task are understanding/mapping out of the different identifiers that are used in Europe, taking into account three cored dimensions: type of identifier, IP, and integrity; collation, defining mappings. - Development of Agreed and Shared Data Models (Ontologies and Vocabularies): analyze and prepare relevant multilingual ontologies and vocabularies related to company data, which can be used across the business cases. Existing schemas/vocabularies/ontologies such as the Organisation Ontology, Registered Organisation Ontology, Corporate actions (part of ISO 20022), OpenCorporates schema, GLEI, etc; serve as input for this task. The task integrates the schemas, extend to the needs of the business cases, and represent them in different languages to help cross-lingual integration of company-related data.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732003.