Company Register 15% open

What data is expected?

List of registered (limited liability) companies. The submissions in this data category does not need to include detailed financial data such as balance sheet etc. To satisfy this category, the following minimum criteria must be met:

• Name of company
• Unique identifier of the company
• Company address
• Updated at least once a month

What data is available

•   Openly licensed? No (No URL given)
•   Is the data available for free? No
•   Is the data machine readable? No (n/a)
•   Available in bulk? No
•   Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? Yes
•   Publicly available? No(as Company register published by KBO)
•   Is data in digital form? No
•   Is the data available online? No (No URL given)
•   Does the data exist? Yes

Details

Reviewer's comment: It appears that it is only possible to obtain companies data by inputting a search term of 9 or 10 characters into this free search engine: http://kbopub.economie.fgov.be/kbopub/zoeknummerform.html There is no other way to freely browse or obtain the data. I have been unable to find evidence of the data as described by the submitter below.

Submitter's comment: There are three ways to obtain this data. One is as an Open Data CSV file that is updated monthly and available for free after registration, in this dataset however you can only see the publicly available information about the companies. There is also a daily updated webservice where users pay 50 euro per 2000 queries. And there is a full xml catalogue, daily updated with more up-to-date information on the companies (current and stopped). For this you pay a license of 75000 euro per year.

As long as the basic way to obtain data is not open without needing to register, we cannot see this as open data under the open definition as defined on http://opendefinition.org/.

Reviewer comments

I could not find evidence of the data as described by the submitter, only the free search feature which is very restrictive.