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mysociety / whatdotheyknow-theme

The Alaveteli theme for WhatDoTheyKnow (UK)
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/
MIT License
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Use Companies House data to help keep the WhatDoTheyKnow database up-to-date #1285

Open RichardTaylor opened 2 years ago

RichardTaylor commented 2 years ago

Seek to:

Companies House data download which might help us do this

https://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_output.html

or we could obtain data via their API

https://developer-specs.company-information.service.gov.uk/companies-house-public-data-api/reference

Related ticket for NHS bodies: https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/issues/828

mdeuk commented 2 years ago

One where this would have been useful is the Great British Railways Transition Team (111666).

Confusingly, the entity we had been listing, Great British Railways Transition Team has been rebranded to Network Rail One Limited. The new entity, which has the same name, is now company 14066335 - which was, oddly enough, previously known as Network Rail One Limited. This change took place on 27 April 2022.

The PSC declared as Network Rail Holdco Limited (company 04423711); whereas, the previous entity PSC was Network Rail Limited (04402220) - which is the company that holds the shares in Holdco.

If we had been consuming Companies House open data on a continuous-integration, or even periodic basis, we might have caught this one sooner - albeit, if we'd have been automating this, we might very well have renamed the entity we list and confused things a little.

The way to solve that conundrum might well be to do a periodic matching exercise against data exposed in the API and have this routed in the same way as a change request - meaning an administrator can review what's changed and make any relevant database edits. In essence, marking the automaton's homework.