In June 2016 the UK government launched the world’s first open “beneficial ownership” register; a requirement for all UK companies to register who were the “persons of significant control”, PSCs, who actually controlled the company. In a partnership between DataKind UK and Global Witness we have built the worlds first network graph mapping all of the UK public data on those who control corporate interests in the UK; it comprises in excess of 4.5 million companies and 4 million individual people. It has been enriched with company officer data and metrics of financial secrecy based upon geographic regions. The goal of the project was to enable Global Witness to search for “shady patterns” within corporate ownership networks to act as leads for investigative journalism to expose corrupt practices. Further more, we were able to analyse the completeness of the register and identify ways of improving such data structures to inform other world governments how to best build similar public registers of corporate ownership. We present here how we built this amazing data structure using Python tools for cleaning and data processing and a Neo4j graph database storing the network graph itself. In addition, we share some of the insights derived from this process.
About the speaker:
Dr Adam Hill is a data scientist and recovering astrophysicist. He gained his PhD in 2006 researching high-energy gamma-ray emission from objects in our galaxy and subsequently worked as a researcher in labs and universities around the world. In 2015 Adam joined HAL24K as their first data scientist, helping to build models and machine learning solutions for smarter cities and infrastructure. He is now their Lead Data Scientist with experience in the analysis of large datasets in both business and scientific contexts, and is responsible for academic connections in the UK. Adam is also a Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Southampton and a core volunteer for DataKind, which helps social change.
Add comment