Holding Companies to Account – Open Data Consolidation | OUseful.Info, the blog...

"... I’ve been pondering the use of open data for holding companies to account again (see also here and here, for example) and a couple of ways forward seem to be crystallising out for me, at least in the way(s) I’ve been hacking some data sketches around. These ways loosely map on to the two senses of consolidation described above, I think? In the first case, using open data sources to map out corporate groupings, or look at how companies start to consolidate into corporate groupings. The OpenCorporates folk are looking at doing this properly – based on share ownership of one company by another – but I’m looking for other signals and sources of data that allow us to associate company names within a wider corporate sprawl. For example, CQC data lists all the locations inspected by that body, along with the group or brand name (if any) under which a particular location operates. We can then use this information to identify all the locations associated with a particular brand or group ..."