In September I blogged about Chris Taggart’s website Open Charities, which opened up data from the Charity Commission website.

Today Taggart – along with Rob McKinnon – launches Open Corporates, which opens up companies information. This is a huge undertaking, but a vital one. As the site’s About page explains:

“Few parts of the corporate world are limited to a single country, and so the world needs a way of bringing the information together in a single place, and more than that, a place that’s accessible to anyone, not just those who subscribe to proprietary datasets.”

Taggart and McKinnon are well placed to do this. In addition to charities data, Taggart has created websites that make it easier to interrogate council spending data and hyperlocal websites; McKinnon has done the same for the New Zealand parliament and UK lobbying.

Below is a video explaining how you can interrogate data from the site using Google Refine. The site promises an API soon.