Analyse and reuse beneficial ownership data from the UK, Denmark or Slovakia

Open Ownership has updated our data analysis toolkit to help anyone wanting to use and work with open data published in line with the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS).

Up-to-date national beneficial ownership data from the UK, Denmark and Slovakia can now be more easily analysed, downloaded and reused via https://bods-data.openownership.org.

A wider variety of formats is available so that anyone can use the data files as csv, SQLite, Postgresql, Parquet or JSON as well as being able to analyse the data using Big Query or Datasette.

This technology work builds on years of our continuing work to demonstrate the value of public access to beneficial ownership data, and its release comes as a European legal ruling has reignited conversations about justifying such access.

To provide insights into these new sources and to judge the quality of the beneficial ownership data published, Open Ownership developed a set of live analysis dashboards which can be used to inspect data from the UK, Denmark and Slovakia.

Launched in March 2022, the free tools for analysts and data journalists continue to allow anyone to use new data from the Open Ownership Register and 2021 data from Latvia.

This update has been made possible thanks to a series of updates to Open Ownership’s technology pipeline.

We now have the ability to ingest, map and transform publicly available beneficial ownership datasets in line with version 0.2 of our Beneficial Ownership Data Standard. We enrich those datasets by reconciling and updating them using bulk company data from OpenCorporates.

In the coming months, Open Ownership will be working to make more countries’ beneficial ownership data available in this way as well as uploading that data into the Open Ownership Register to make it searchable and to connect it between international jurisdictions.

To help governments improve how accurate and comprehensive their data is, we will be partnering with them and offering a range of data analysis support.

Open Ownership advocates that beneficial ownership data should be available in a structured format to allow it to be more easily analysed and linked with other datasets.

The open source code powering the analysis tools and the data processing tools is available on Github alongside other repositories for our other tools and work. This work has also been made possible thanks to Flatterer from our technical partners at Open Data Services.

To share feedback about these tools, please raise issues on Github or connect with the data support team at Open Ownership via email at [email protected].