New subject: Kickstartet: Adding 2.2 million German organisations to Wikidata

16 Oct 2017

Hi Sebastian,

This is huge! It will cover almost all currently existing German companies. Many of these
will have similar names, so preparing for disambiguation is a concern.

A good way for such an approach would be proposing a property for an external identifier,
loading the data into Mix-n-match, creating links for companies already in Wikidata, and
adding the rest (or perhaps only parts of them - I’m not sure if having all of them in
Wikidata makes sense, but that’s another discussion), preferably with location and/or
sector of trade in the description field.

I’ve tried to figure out what could be used as key for a external identifier property.
However, it looks like the registry does not offer any (persistent) URL to its entries. So
for looking up a company, apparently there are two options:

-          conducting an extended search for the exact string “A&A
Dienstleistungsgesellschaft mbH“

-          copying the register number “32853” plus selecting the court (Leipzig) from the
according dropdown list and search that

Both ways are not very intuitive, even if we can provide a link to the search form. This
would make a weak connection to the source of information. Much more important, it makes
disambiguation in Mix-n-match difficult. This applies for the preparation of your initial
load (you would not want to create duplicates). But much more so for everybody else who
wants to match his or her data later on. Being forced to search for entries manually in a
cumbersome way for disambiguation of a new, possibly large and rich dataset is, in my
eyes, not something we want to impose on future contributors. And often, the free
information they find in the registry (formal name, register number, legal form, address)
will not easily match with the information they have (common name, location, perhaps
founding date, and most important sector of trade), so disambiguation may still be
difficult.

Have you checked which parts of the accessible information as below can be crawled and
added legally to external databases such as Wikidata?

Cheers, Joachim

--
Joachim Neubert

ZBW – German National Library of Economics
Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
Neuer Jungfernstieg 21
20354 Hamburg
Phone +49-42834-462

Von: Wikidata [mailto:wikidata-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von Sebastian
Hellmann
Gesendet: Sonntag, 15. Oktober 2017 09:45
An: wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org>
Betreff: [Wikidata] Kickstartet: Adding 2.2 million German organisations to Wikidata

Hi all,

the German business registry contains roughly 2.2 million organisations. Some information
is paid, but other is public, i.e. the info you are searching for at and clicking on UT
(see example below):

https://www.handelsregister.de/rp_web/mask.do?Typ=e

I would like to add this to Wikidata, either by crawling or by raising money to use
crowdsourcing concepts like crowdflour or amazon turk.

It should meet notability criteria 2: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Notability

2. It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity. The
entity must be notable, in the sense that it can be described using serious and publicly
available references. If there is no item about you yet, you are probably not notable.

The reference is the official German business registry, which is serious and public. Orgs
are also per definition clearly identifiable legal entities.

How can I get clearance to proceed on this?

All the best,
Sebastian

Entity data

Saxony District court Leipzig HRB 32853 – A&A Dienstleistungsgesellschaft mbH

Legal status:

Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung

Capital:

25.000,00 EUR

Date of entry:

29/08/2016
(When entering date of entry, wrong data input can occur due to system failures!)

Date of removal:

-

Balance sheet available:

-

Address (subject to correction):

A&A Dienstleistungsgesellschaft mbH
Prager Straße 38-40
04317 Leipzig

--
All the best,
Sebastian Hellmann

Director of Knowledge Integration and Linked Data Technologies (KILT) Competence Center
at the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) at Leipzig University
Executive Director of the DBpedia Association
Projects: http://dbpedia.org, http://nlp2rdf.org, http://linguistics.okfn.org,
https://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt<http://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt>
Homepage: http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann
Research Group: http://aksw.org

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