A non-comprehensive list or a comprehensive platform?

Hello all!

I was doing the survey for Rio de Janeiro’s Company Register dimension and I have a dilemma that I would like to ask for your guidance in what should I do.

I have two different sources that are in accordance with different requirements of this dimension:

  1. the first one is a platform that permits individual consultation per company, providing its name and address, but I need to have prior knowledge on the ID to make the search. In this case, no list and no download is available, but all the companies are there to search.

  2. the second one is a list of companies with ID, name and address, downloadable in .txt format, but it is not comprehensive. It means that not all companies registered are there, only those that operates with a electronic invoice system.

In this case I have to choose between a full-information not available in a list dataset versus a not full information but available in a list dataset.

What do you think would be the best choice?
@tlacoyodefrijol @Mor @arielkogan

Thanks in advance!

Best,
Wagner

I think it is pretty obvious from the order of questions:

  1. Data should be a list of registered (limited liability) companies
  2. Data should be provided by Government
  3. Data should be online
  4. Data should include name, address and identifier
  5. Data should be available for the entire jurisdiction

I think that if the list is not comprehensive, you should disregard it.

There’s a caveat though. In the transition period government might not have the comprehensive data.
I think it defines the quality of data which AFAIK is not evaluated by the Index.
In this case government decided that their registry is to be comprehensive, but it’s yet to be the case.
The index evaluates “openness”. That is if the government opens all the official data they have about companies, it should have the highest score.

As you described it, it sounds like the government have the comprehensive list, but only published a limited subset. In this case you should ignore that limited subset until it becomes comprehensive.

P.S. This is my personal opinion as a volunteer contributor.

2 Likes

Hello @vanuan
Thanks for your answer!

Based on what you said, I think I’ll consider the comprehensive dataset (it means, all the data exists, but is not open in accordance with GODI criteria), and I’ll document that I found another limited dataset with less information.

Best,
Wagner