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.
Main objective: 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. This is achieved by leveraging the power of the emerging technologies such as Data-as-a-Service and Linked Data.
More specifically, to achieve the main objective the following objectives are defined:
1. Business Graph Design: Create and maintain a system of shared identifiers for companies in Europe, together with a mechanism for mapping to existing proprietary identifier systems, while at the same time relying on common conceptual models (e.g., shared vocabularies and ontologies) to address semantic heterogeneity and cross-lingual problems in company-related data;
2. Business Graph Provisioning: Integrate, host, and sustain a scalable business graph data marketplace (with capabilities for data cleaning, enrichment, integration, interlinking, publication, hosting, as well as serving as an entry point for company-related data discovery, exploration and analytics), and grow an ecosystem of 3rd party applications and company-related data services.
…and based on business graph and the data made available via the business graph data marketplace, create a set of six data-driven business products and services focusing on company-related data value chains across domains that can be replicated throughout Europe:
3. Create a new product for corporate events data access (“CED”), by leveraging the approach and provisioning the infrastructure of euBusinessGraph for integrating public corporate register data with the OpenCorporates.com database, which targets a wide range of stakeholders ranging from sales and marketing to regulators.
4. Increase the revenues generated by an existing tenders discovery service to evaluate companies participating in public administration tenders (“TDS”), currently widely used by the Italian public sector.
5. Extend an existing SaaS B2B lead generation service (“Atoka+”), which currently targets the Italian market (it is used by hundreds of small to medium enterprises (SMEs), banks, large corporations, and local government bodies), by expanding its coverage to two new countries (UK and Norway), and at the same time improving the data quality and coverage for all the three covered countries.
6. Provide a novel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service (“CRM-S”) as an extension to an existing CRM offering in Norway, enabling a new line of business for CRM vendors and allowing them to extend their offering by integrating high-quality data from the provisioned business graph.
7. Create an innovative data journalism product (“DJP”) to support data journalists with better access to cross-border company networks data that additionally offers customised packages of company-related data to consumers of media products.
8. Create a Norwegian Public Registries API service (“BR-S”) to improve accessibility to four (currently disconnected) major Norwegian authoritative public sector registers (Central Coordinating Register for Legal Entities, Register of Business Enterprises, The Registry of Company Accounts, and Registry of State Aid), by publishing them in Linked Data format as part of the business graph provisioned by euBusinessGraph.
