Towards Linked Open Business Registers

Abstract

Business data is high-value data and has a high reuse potential both in national and in cross-border settings. National business registers, tax authorities and others are currently holding such data. Opening up basic business data and making it available in machine-readable formats will definitely increase its reuse. In this work, the authors present, following a stepwise approach, how this can be achieved. They used a part of the dataset of legal entities, comprising approximately 29000 entities, maintained by the Greek Tax Authorities and described it with the Registered Organization vocabulary (RegOrg). The authors followed a publishing and consumption pipeline and made this data available as Linked Open Government Data (LOGD). They conclude this work with a number of findings and lessons learnt which can be useful for base registers and other owners of authoritative data that are considering moving towards LOGD.