Open Data in the Enterprise Context: Assessing Open Corporate Data’s Readiness for Use

Open data initiatives have long focused on motivating governmental bodies to open up their data. Although governments and other organizations make their data increasingly available, open data consumers are reluctant or experience difficulties with using open data. Prior studies have therefore set the focus on open data portals and open data quality, but only few have examined enterprises as consumers of open data. To close this gap, we aim at assessing whether open data is ready for use by enterprises. We focus our efforts on open corporate data, i.e., data on companies provided by business registers, which has confirmed reuse potential. Our assessment of 30 business registers confirms that the heterogeneity of access, licensing, publishing conditions, and content in open corporate datasets hinder their reuse in a business context. Only half of analyzed registers provide companies’ full legal addresses, only 20% mention their complete organizational information, while contact details are fully available in 13% of all the cases. We find that open data’s readiness for use from an enterprise perspective is highly dependent on the concrete use case.