The EBG “company data marketplace” ia a place where company data providers can advertise their data, and data consumers can search, analyse, and compare data from the data providers, all in a unified way. The goal is to establish a highly interconnected graph of Europe-wide company-related information both from authoritative and non-authoritative sources.
In order to represent, compare and combine company data from multiple data providers, we defined a common semantic model (euBusinessGraph ontology) that allows to represent companies and their attributes in a consistent way.
The EBG Marketplace contains a subset of company data covering the jurisdictions (countries) United Kingdom, Italy, Norway, Bulgaria, Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg. The source data are provided by the consortium members OpenCorporporates, SpazioDati, Brønnøysund Register Centre and Ontotext in the project.
One of the main points of the euBusinessGraph project is the democratisation of the company information market, which is currently dominated by a couple of large international players, which creates a market barrier for smaller data owners. The goal of the marketplace is to enable these smaller players to join a common ecosystem/platform to promote their offerings.
The data marketplace application provides search and discovery of company data in the EU. The marketplace application implements the following features:
- The application uses a GraphDB database to store data,
- The architecture is built according to the microservices architectural pattern that ensures great flexibility in development and deployment,
- Two different types of search are implemented: 1) full-text and 2) faceted search, where one can explore the knowledge graph and search for companies that meet specified criteria,
- Integrates third-party software to search for news articles and events,
- Provides different graphs of data which can be analyzed, searched and explored by invoking queries directly across a set of diverse datasets sharing common properties,
- Data providers joining the business graph share a common subset of their data described in accordance with a common data model,
- The common shared data are kept in a GraphDB database in the form of a graph of linked data that conforms to the common semantic model (ontology).
Economic and Societal, Public Administration, SMEs, Companies
The market for database of companies is changing as new methods and strategies for collecting and distributing data is forming the market.
The euBusinessGraph project aims to address those changes by making data available across borders and continents through a common graph model and a marketplace that enhances the value of data and enriches them by utilizing market leading analytics.
There are three distinct customer segments of the euBusinessGraph Marketplace, namely (1) data providers, (2) data consumers and (3) service providers.
- This group of users (data providers)has data which they would like to monetize. A data marketplace such as the euBusinessGraph Marketplace could provide a channel for them to achieve this. The data provider may have company data from one or more national registries that it wants to market and sell through the marketplace. Data providers can also provide other types of company data, e.g., an organization which has information on outstanding invoices in their Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) solution could be interested in providing this information via the marketplace to credit scoring companies for a fee.
- This group of users (data consumers) requires certain types of business-related data in the daily operation of their organizations to help them make better business decisions. Figure 4 shows a value proposition canvas for a generic data consumer. An example of a data consumer is an organization that gets a credit scoring report at a fee to evaluate the strength of the financial footing of a potential customer or vendor.
- This group of users (service providers) can provide better visualization of the data available in the data marketplace. They can potentially provide various data services on the vast amount of data available in a data marketplace such as data cleaning and data quality assurance or produce new data and insights that add value on top of the data that is already available.
The marketplace application is built according to the microservices architectural pattern that ensures great flexibility in development and deployment.
- Data providers joining the business graph share a common subset of their data described according to a common data model.
- The common data are kept in a GraphDB database in the form of a graph of linked data that conforms to the common semantic model (ontology).
The EBG Mrketplace offer a set of open-source tools that can be used to map from your specific data format to the euBusinessGraph ontology for easy integration of your company data.
The process of onboarding data in euBusinessGraph consists of two consecutive stages:
- Design-time: Cleaning, transforming and mapping the company data to the euBusinessGraph ontology using the Grafterizer and ASIA tools. The output of this step is an executable JAR file.
- Run-time: The JAR file is used in batch processing of CSV company data to N-Triples which are uploaded to GraphDB, which is the underlying triple store that serves this marketplace.