A Linked Data wrapper for CrunchBase

Abstract

CrunchBase is a database about startups and technology companies. The data can be searched, browsed, and edited via a website, but is also accessible via an entity-centric HTTP API in JSON format. We present a wrapper around the API that provides the data as Linked Data. The wrapper provides schema-level links to schema.org, Friend-of-a-Friend and Vocabularyof-a-Friend, and entity-level links to DBpedia for organization entities. Further, we describe how to harvest the RDF data to obtain a local copy of the data for further processing and querying that goes beyond the query facilities of the CrunchBase API. Our Linked Data API for CrunchBase and a previous version of it have already been used in two cases, whereas our crawled CrunchBase RDF data set has been used once for data integration and once for information extraction on text. CrunchBase has also been used twice for exploratory data analysis.

On the origin of technological acquisition strategy: The interaction between organizational plasticity and environmental munificence

“…I used a variety of sources to supplement VentureXpert, 20 the leading database on VC investments. Identifying the VC investors for our sample firms was facilitated by a recently released Linked Data API wrapper which allows for the automated searching of the CrunchBase data (Dalle, den Besten, & Menon, 2017; Färber, Menne, & Harth, 2018) In addition, a team of RAs read through news articles and the S‐1 filings to look for mentions of VC investors, especially those with seats on the firm's board. As in the specifications in Table 1, the year reported is 10, but the results are robust to analyzing other years.…”

Using Crunchbase for economic and managerial research

“…Several works have benefitted from the "linkability" of Crunchbase, by integrating it with other datasets in order to augment the possibilities offered to research through to the data thus merged. Methodologically speaking, a small group of scholars have even proposed to use more generic mechanisms to link Crunchbase data with other data 7 , while the question of how Web-based data like Crunchbase can be integrated with the Semantic Web is treated by O'Riain et al 2012, Goto et al (2013), and Färber et al (2016).…”

Linked Crunchbase: A Linked Data API and RDF Data Set About Innovative Companies

“…1. We can execute complex SPARQL queries against the Crunchbase RDF data set which go beyond plain keyword-based information retrieval and beyond queries about single entities [5]. 2.…”

“…All linked data wrappers which have been developed so far for Crunchbase do not work any more due to updates on the underlying Crunchbase API and other reasons [5]. The Crunchbase data sets used and published so far (e.g., for economic studies) have not been represented in RDF or only cover small parts of the whole Crunchbase database.…”

“…The Crunchbase data sets used and published so far (e.g., for economic studies) have not been represented in RDF or only cover small parts of the whole Crunchbase database. 5 Note also that the licensing model of Crunchbase has been changed, leading to some limitations. 6 Newly created Crunchbase data sets may not be shared free of charge any longer.…”