The Companies We Keep: Building a network graph of UK corporate ownership data
Description changed:
Welcome to our third event in the series of virtual PyData Edinburgh! As per usual, we're keeping this into the 1-hour format, and we will have a main talk plus a Q&A session at the end. We will meet at 6pm, use the Zoom link which will be provided in the registration email once you RSVP.
As always, let us know if you would like to give a talk, whether a main or a lightning one, we're always looking out for speakers (as you know!). Specifically, we'd like for the next event to be a lightning talks-only one, and we're looking for 5 speakers to give a lightning (5 mins!).
MAIN TALK:
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Bio: Adam is a recovering astrophysicist who made the transition to commercial data science 5 years ago. He is currently Lead Data Scientist at HAL24K, a smart-city startup. Adam is also a Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Southampton and a core volunteer with DataKind UK.
Abstract: 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.
LOGISTICS
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1745: Zoom Waiting room will open
1800: Meetup will start - welcome & community announcements followed by our main speaker, and then Q&A
We'll aim to be finished by 1900
REMOTE MEETINGS
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Please remember the Code of Conduct applies to a remote meeting as well.
When you join the meeting, your microphone will be muted, and your camera switched on, we miss you all, it's nice to see you! Once the talk starts, feel free to switch your camera off.
We'll use the chat channel in Zoom to deal with any issues, and we'll advise on how we will run the Q&A at the start of the session.
SPONSORS
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While we might not be making such full use of our sponsors as we normally do, we still appreciate all they do for us to allow us to run this group - so thanks to Cathcart Associates, Wood Mackenzie, Solarwinds, Lloyds Banking, Canon Medical and Effini.
CODE OF CONDUCT
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Though virtual, our Code of Conduct still applies to all attendees, organisers and speakers. Please take the time to read through if you haven't before, we really appreciate your help to maintain a welcoming and friendly PyData community.
The PyData Code of Conduct (https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct/) governs this meetup. To discuss any issues or concerns relating to the code of conduct or the behavior of anyone at a PyData meetup, please contact the local group organizers (message us on the meetup page). Please also submit a report of any potential Code of Conduct violation directly to NumFOCUS using the link found at https://numfocus.org/code-of-conduct.
