In a significant move that will take UK open data to another level, Companies House, the UK Business Register, is planning to make available its entire digital data, free of charge, starting second quarter 2015. Once this service goes live, it will give the public access to the digital records of over 3 million companies.
Underlining further the growing importance of open data, the topic will take centre stage during the UK Government’s annual ICT Conference taking place on 13th January at the QE2 conference centre in London.
During his opening Keynote Address, Liam Maxwell, Chief Technology Officer for HM Government, will highlight the £1.5million funding being allocated to the opening up of public data and the move towards rapid digitisation of government transactions and services. By promoting digitisation, the UK Government aims to deliver more efficient public services and increased transparency, providing access to a wealth of information currently locked away in UK government databases.
CoreFiling open data seminar
Later in the day, CoreFiling will host a seminar picking up the open data theme, with contributions from Companies House, XBRL Inc. and XBRL UK. The programme will include an exploration of the Companies House accounts data service, an introduction to the increasingly important XBRL standard (with a particular focus on Inline XBRL), and the ways in which the data can be exploited to gain insights into UK businesses as a whole, into particular business sectors or into businesses within a local area.
Illustrating how accessible the iXBRL data can be, CoreFiling provides a free search and query service giving access to over 2 million company accounts in iXBRL format. Take a look at the CoreFiling service.