OpenCorporates, the world’s largest source of open legal-entity data, is proud to announce the launch of the Legal-Entity Data Principles to address a company-data trust and quality gap that risks undermining prosperity, sustainability and fairness in society.
The pace, complexity and automation of the corporate world has exposed a significant and growing gap in company-data quality between legacy company data and what’s required in today’s world to provide the insight and trust that business, governments and society need. This is especially important in a world where AI and the data used to train it, play an ever more central role.
“Legal entities are the fundamental atomic elements behind the entire business world. Yet legal-entity data is still largely built on obfuscation, proprietary identifiers, opaque data models, hidden bias and restrictive access. The Legal-Entity Data Principles provide a rigorous, well-thought out set of principles that redress this.” said OpenCorporates CEO and Co-Founder Chris Taggart.
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With the introduction of the Legal-Entity Data Principles, OpenCorporates aims to set new standards in data integrity and trust, and is releasing the Principles under an open licence so they can be adopted by anyone using, producing or regulating legal entity data.
Taggart added: “We believe the Principles provide a framework of verifiable trust and create new benchmarks for foundational data in this domain. Users and regulators now have a tool by which they can judge what good looks like, and data producers have a standard to which they can work towards..”
Since its conception in 2010, OpenCorporates has worked with government agencies, NGOs and public-benefit groups to improve the quality and accessibility of legal-entity data. Its database covers over 220 million companies sourced directly from over 1400 state registries. The company has been instrumental in supporting high profile investigations such as the Panama Papers and is used by leading banks, businesses, regulators, financial-crime agencies, journalists, NGOs and technology companies across the world..
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The company’s thoughtful and transparent data processes have consistently garnered praise from industry leaders and stakeholders.
Hicham Outghiri, CEO at Enigma, a leading data-analytics company, commended OpenCorporates‘ approach: “Open Corporates has once again set itself apart with the release of its Legal Entity Data Principles.”
“Their data process is consistently thoughtful & transparent, and it shows in the quality of their data. It is inspiring to see them innovate and at the same time maintain a principled approach to tackling massive challenges in the supply chain of data.”
The Legal Entity Data Principles establish a robust framework for accuracy, dependability and trustworthiness. They comprise seven tenets:
- Foundational data should be sourced from official primary sources
- Hidden bias is a silent killer and should be minimized by ensuring all decisions made in data collection and curation are transparent
- Full end-to-end audit trails are essential — only full audit trails give the trust and utility users need
- Standards reduce friction for users; open and established standards should be used wherever possible
- Data should be collected and made available in functionally real-time
- Data quality needs a dataset perspective — you can’t identify bias, systematic quality issues or key insights by looking at individual records.
- Open is an essential component of data quality; in contrast, proprietary IDs, opaque data models, and limited feedback loops are highly damaging
The company’s ongoing commitment to data integrity and transparency strengthens its position as the trusted authority in legal-entity data, empowering businesses, researchers, and policymakers worldwide.
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