Unless I'm not seeing some other visualization of the data, I don't really see how correlating companies to physical locations helps a whole lot, and was not what I expected to be the goal when I started reading. The pain point that needs to be addressed is "too big to fail", but mapping to physical location does nothing to help that.
A more conceptual map showing, for instance, the players in the mortgage space, their relative size, and how they generally interact would actually be a step towards solving the problem. Now how to gather information like THAT is a whole other question.
As a concrete example: Most of the major home insurers have offices in Florida, but don't actually write policies. Who is actually writing these policies? If we have everything tracing back to a single policy writer, then we have a major problem.
> Governments and regulators are releasing huge amounts of data. Collecting, publishing & linking it to company data will give us the global picture of the finance sector.
> OpenCorporates' mission is to bring this data into the open. This is a gargantuan task, so we thought we'd start with a single step: gather data about which companies are permitted to carry out what financial activities, where.
It really is the starting point. I work at OpenCorporates and have worked on this campaign! We don't know what the data will tell us unless we scrape all of it though one of my colleagues took a look at the financial licenses from US and found some interesting insights. For instance, if you think about which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? There are 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US. Many are presumably outsourced - he have found some controlled by Ocwen and by Bank of America. This may be useful information for various reasons but we can't get there if we don't do the step 1 which is to have all the data scraped and published as open data so we can have many eyes examining it.
I agree with addressing the "too big to fail" pain point, and I think a conceptual map to help with that ought to include:
* industry players & interactions
* political donations
* relationships between corporate executives, K street (lobbyists), congress critters, legislative staffers, interns
* relationships between regulatory agency executives, K street, congress critters, legislative staffers, interns
* former (and potential) primary candidates in the congress critters' districts
* a scatterplot of how a given congress critter voted on various related issues, as well as which of their votes (related or not) are out of sync with the voters in their district
Now that's a useful tool right there. Probably a pipe dream ... ah well.
A more conceptual map showing, for instance, the players in the mortgage space, their relative size, and how they generally interact would actually be a step towards solving the problem. Now how to gather information like THAT is a whole other question.
As a concrete example: Most of the major home insurers have offices in Florida, but don't actually write policies. Who is actually writing these policies? If we have everything tracing back to a single policy writer, then we have a major problem.