OpenCorporates — Global Corporate Registry

1. Summary

OpenCorporates aggregates corporate registry data from 130+ jurisdictions worldwide (~200M companies). Covers US state-level filings (NY DOS, Delaware DOC, California SOS, etc.), UK Companies House, EU registries, and most common-law jurisdictions.

2. Access Methods

REST API: https://api.opencorporates.com/v0.4/
HTML fallback: https://opencorporates.com/companies?q=...
Auth: API token required (free tier 500 calls/month, paid plans available)
Rate limit: Token-bound; un-tokened requests return 401

Set OPENCORPORATES_API_TOKEN env var. Get a free token at https://opencorporates.com/api_accounts/new.

3. Data Schema

Key fields emitted by fetch_opencorporates.py:

Column	Type	Description
`name`	str	Company legal name
`company_number`	str	Registry-assigned number
`jurisdiction_code`	str	e.g. `us_ny`, `us_de`, `gb`
`jurisdiction_name`	str	Human-readable jurisdiction
`incorporation_date`	str	YYYY-MM-DD
`dissolution_date`	str	YYYY-MM-DD (empty if active)
`company_type`	str	Domestic LLC / Foreign Corp / etc.
`status`	str	Active / Inactive / Dissolved
`registered_address`	str	Registered office address
`opencorporates_url`	str	Link to OpenCorporates entity page
`officers_count`	str	Total officers on record
`source`	str	`api`, `html`, or `html-fallback`

4. Coverage

US: all 50 states + DC at state level (LLCs, corps, LPs)
International: UK, EU, Canada, Australia, NZ, many APAC + LATAM jurisdictions
~200M company records cumulative
Update frequency varies by jurisdiction (UK CH is near-realtime; some state registries lag months)

5. Cross-Reference Potential

NYC ACRIS ↔ name (LLC/corp owners of NYC property)
USAspending ↔ name (corporate federal contractors)
SEC EDGAR ↔ name (public companies + their subsidiaries)
ICIJ Offshore ↔ name (international corporate structures)

Join key: normalized company name. Some entries have previous_names arrays which are not currently exported by the fetch script — query OC directly for that.

6. Data Quality

Company-name spellings vary across re-incorporations and renames
Officer records are spottier than company records (many jurisdictions don't require officer disclosure)
Beneficial-ownership data is generally NOT here — most jurisdictions don't require it. UK Companies House has PSC (people with significant control) but that's not universal.
Cross-jurisdictional links (parent / subsidiary) are based on registry filings only; corporate trees are often incomplete

7. Acquisition Script

Path: scripts/fetch_opencorporates.py

# Search globally by name
python3 SKILL_DIR/scripts/fetch_opencorporates.py --query "Example Corp" \
    --out data/oc.csv

# Restrict to a jurisdiction
python3 SKILL_DIR/scripts/fetch_opencorporates.py --query "Example Corp" \
    --jurisdiction us_ny --out data/oc_ny.csv

# Set token via env or flag
OPENCORPORATES_API_TOKEN=xxx python3 SKILL_DIR/scripts/fetch_opencorporates.py \
    --query "Microsoft" --out data/oc.csv

Without a token the script falls back to scraping the HTML search page. The fallback is brittle and only fills in name, jurisdiction_code, opencorporates_url — set the token for serious work.

8. Legal & Licensing

OpenCorporates aggregates public records — the underlying facts are public domain
OpenCorporates own database is licensed CC-BY-SA-4.0; attribution required
API ToS prohibits redistributing the full dataset; per-record reference is fine

9. References

API docs: https://api.opencorporates.com/documentation/API-Reference
Jurisdiction codes: https://api.opencorporates.com/v0.4/jurisdictions.json
Schema: https://opencorporates.com/info/our_data