[from Chris at OpenCorporates]
Thanks for all the useful comments. Wondered if anyone tried the Advanced Search, and particularly the experimental 'search by relevance', which gives Apple Inc as the top score. It's experimental in part because what two users my not have the same view of relevant as each other (one reason why Google wants you to be logged in when searching, so it can return searches on what it thinks is relevant to you).
Re the number of results, with over 95 million companies from hundreds of official sources, there are a lot of companies with the same or similar names -- that's part of the power, and why OpenCorporates is so widely used by journalists, anti-corruption investigators, lawyers, law-enforcement etc. The more we loosen the search, however, the more results you will get -- so it's a balancing act, and the advanced search and the API is part of us trying to make it work for users, and we'd love feedback on both -- just email us at community @ opencorporates dot com
For large listed companies such as Apple or Intel, it depends on what question you are trying to answer. If it's just an overview of the corporation, then Wikipedia or something like Yahoo Finance is the best route. The former gives a narrative overview, using the collected expertise of hundreds of contributors; the latter includes highly proprietary data (which was also for the most part collected by offshore humans) to build an overall picture.
However, for official, provenanced data under an open licence about legal entities, OpenCorporates is by far the best option -- the Facebook example is a good one. Contrary to many people's expectations, Facebook is not a California Corporation. However, because they operate in California they have to register as a branch (aka Foreign Corporation), and if you land on that page (https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_ca/C2711108) you'll see that we actually link to the home corporation, in Delaware (https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_de/3835815), and there we list subsidiaries and other branches. Why don't we have Instagram? You can check from the source of the subsidiaries we list (e.g. https://opencorporates.com/statements/37307675 which links to the SEC Exhibit 21 filing at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001326801150... ), and you can see there that they don't list Instagram (possibly because either there's no separate company for it, or because it doesn't count as a material subsidiary).
So the question often becomes (and news stories are problematic for multiple reasons), where can you find the linkages that can be parsed into structured, provenanced data in a reliable way. We're focusing on two areas: looking for sources of public data that can be combined together to give insight to all, and building up a community of users to help us do that: http://impact.opencorporates.com/contribute/
Please do consider joining us in this important mission, or just by pinging us with suggestions of how we can do better.
Re the number of results, with over 95 million companies from hundreds of official sources, there are a lot of companies with the same or similar names -- that's part of the power, and why OpenCorporates is so widely used by journalists, anti-corruption investigators, lawyers, law-enforcement etc. The more we loosen the search, however, the more results you will get -- so it's a balancing act, and the advanced search and the API is part of us trying to make it work for users, and we'd love feedback on both -- just email us at community @ opencorporates dot com
For large listed companies such as Apple or Intel, it depends on what question you are trying to answer. If it's just an overview of the corporation, then Wikipedia or something like Yahoo Finance is the best route. The former gives a narrative overview, using the collected expertise of hundreds of contributors; the latter includes highly proprietary data (which was also for the most part collected by offshore humans) to build an overall picture.
However, for official, provenanced data under an open licence about legal entities, OpenCorporates is by far the best option -- the Facebook example is a good one. Contrary to many people's expectations, Facebook is not a California Corporation. However, because they operate in California they have to register as a branch (aka Foreign Corporation), and if you land on that page (https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_ca/C2711108) you'll see that we actually link to the home corporation, in Delaware (https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_de/3835815), and there we list subsidiaries and other branches. Why don't we have Instagram? You can check from the source of the subsidiaries we list (e.g. https://opencorporates.com/statements/37307675 which links to the SEC Exhibit 21 filing at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001326801150... ), and you can see there that they don't list Instagram (possibly because either there's no separate company for it, or because it doesn't count as a material subsidiary).
So the question often becomes (and news stories are problematic for multiple reasons), where can you find the linkages that can be parsed into structured, provenanced data in a reliable way. We're focusing on two areas: looking for sources of public data that can be combined together to give insight to all, and building up a community of users to help us do that: http://impact.opencorporates.com/contribute/
Please do consider joining us in this important mission, or just by pinging us with suggestions of how we can do better.