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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - euBusinessGraph (Enabling the European Business Graph for Innovative Data Products and Services)

Teaser

Summary

Corporate data is an ever-increasing asset in the digitalisation of business and society, and its use is extremely significant in many business sectors (e.g., business information, marketing and sales, business publishing) and societal activities (e.g., transparency and accountability). The integration of company-related data from authoritative and non-authoritative public and private sector sources is currently a difficult and expensive task that hinders cross-sectorial innovation. Addressing this problem in a coherent and unifying way represents a huge business opportunity for a wide range of companies in the data economy. euBusinessGraph aims to create the foundations of a European cross-border and cross-lingual business graph through aggregating, linking, and provisioning (open and non-open) high-quality company-related data, thereby demonstrating innovation across sectors where company-related data value chains are relevant.

Work performed

The focus over the first period of euBusinessGraph was to establish a foundation for the business graph. Thereby, we have developed a fist version of the core Company Model that covers companies, company types, status, addresses, location data, classifications of economic activities, and company registrations (in official and alternate registers). Furthermore, we have developed a model to create euBusinessGraph company identifiers. To support the data onboarding, we have designed and implemented an initial release of the tools and services that are to comprise the euBusinessGraph marketplace. The tools and services support data import, data cleaning, data transformation, schema-level semantic annotation, knowledge graph vocabulary search and statistics, data hosting and queries, analytics, multi-lingual annotation, as well as other operational services. As part of the work on the business graph we have started to integrate and deploy selected datasets from OpenCorporates and SpazioDati with accordance to the euBusinessGraph Company Model.
Apart from the technical results, the project has advanced the development of six data-driven business products and services based on company-related data value chains across domains that can be replicated throughout Europe. In particular, 1) the Corporate Events Data access, which aims at integrating public corporate register data with the OpenCorporates.com database, 2) the Tender Discovery Service, which is a service for supporting companies in discovering new open tender opportunities tailored to their company profiles, 3) the Atoka+ B2B lead generation service, 4) the Customer Relationship Management Service (CRM-S), which leverages business data to establish new lines of business, 5) the Data Journalism Product Service supports journalists in dealing with complex and large volumes of company related data across the three journalistic workflows: search, monitoring and content production, and 6) the Norwegian Public Registries API service, which improves accessibility of the four (currently disconnected) major Norwegian authoritative public sector registers.

Final results

euBusinessGraph has advanced the state of the art both in the area of technical infrastructures for the business graph and in the specific domains of the six data-driven products and services.
During the first period, the project has defined an innovative vocabulary for representing company data in the euBusinessGraph Company model. During the following period of the project, the modelling work will be further extended to cover aspects of information on company-related entities (i.e., officers and shareholders), provenance, certainty and additional dataset offerings that are not part of the model (i.e., extra information present in the source datasets and how to reach it). The work on the integration of the dataset will continue to extend the scope of the business graph provided in the euBusinessGraph Marketplace. The Marketplace services will be operationalised and deployed in a production setting, whereby the graph can be exploited and extended to include external data.
In terms of business impact, euBusinessGraph has developed an initial business model for the euBusinessGraph Marketplace. Furthermore, we have started the development of the seven innovative products/services, which have the potential to impact on both the public and private sectors. The Corporate Events Data access (CED) service has firmed up its initial assumptions, tested those in the market, and built a proof-of-concept to both understand the technical issues and to test with existing and potential clients. The Tender Discovery Service has developed the underlying processes and collected a set of datasets for open tender calls. In business terms, it has performed customer, market and competition analysis, which has resulted in the definition of data quality rules and enabling functionality for manual search. The Atoka+ service has been improved with respect to use cases and implementation of features for applying it in a wider scope than just Italy. Thereby, the service has onboarded new official data from the Business Graph about UK companies\' basic firmographics and plans to further enrich the dataset with company-related content, including using web crawling. The CRM-S solution has been enriched with analytics platform infrastructure for continuously running and updating machine learning models based on data from euBusinessGraph (currently being tested in Minimum Viable Product version). For the Data Journalism Product a conceptual mock-up has been created, demonstrating technical concepts and UI-approach. This was used for user testing, confirming business value and key hypotheses derived from business models. This has been followed by the first working pilot application with three integrated data sets and additional market analysis. This service will enable journalists to easily search and monitor company data across sources and to create related content items. Finally, the BR-S service has already developed an improved solution for providing data from the Coordinating Register for Legal Entities in Norway (publicly available in March). The implementation has substantially increased capacity and now allows to search for deleted companies from the register. Future development will allow additionally to get information about roles and people with these roles plus accounts information will be available later.