The new Open Ownership Register: faster, more efficient and produces more detailed beneficial ownership data

The technology behind the Open Ownership Register has been updated to be faster, leaner and more efficient, as well as publishing more detailed and up-to-date beneficial ownership data on millions of companies.

By moving to a new technology stack and a new approach to streaming data, the Open Ownership Register now exports data 100 times faster and for a fraction of the previous cost. It also publishes more detailed, high-quality beneficial ownership data.

The Open Ownership Register combines beneficial ownership datasets from multiple countries to follow complicated ownership and control structures wherever the data leads.

Data from the United Kingdom, Denmark and Slovakia is ingested, mapped to our internationally recognised data standard and made available to download or reuse for free. We also reconcile and enrich these datasets using bulk data and an Application Programming Interface (API) provided by OpenCorporates.

All the data pulled into the Open Ownership Register is now mapped to version 0.2 of the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard - rather than version 0.1 - and refreshed regularly.

These changes make it easier for new datasets published as open data and in line with the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard to be incorporated into the Open Ownership Register.

To help analysts, journalists and anyone wanting to examine and dive into our high-quality beneficial ownership data, we offer free data analysis tools which convert the JSON data from the Open Ownership Register into a range of formats to work with.

You can now use these tools to examine beneficial ownership data from the UK, Denmark, Latvia and Slovakia as well as to examine mapped corporate ownership data from the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation.

Bulk data from the Open Ownership Register is available to download for free and is published under an open license to encourage reuse.

All the code powering the Open Ownership Register and associated tools for transforming, reconciling and combining beneficial ownership data is published via Open Ownership’s Github account using open software licenses.

If you would like to learn more about this work, please email us via [email protected].