opencorporates blog: “It is thanks to the persistence, effort, and hard-work from open data advocates both inside and outside government that French companies are now available as open data. Since January, France’s Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE) has published the official “SIRENE” company registration database as open data, and after extensive analysis and processing, we added this data to OpenCorporates. This added over 10 million entities, making it our 120th jurisdiction, and the 2nd largest just behind the UK. The INSEE dataset is very extensive, covering companies, associations, sole traders / individuals & state bodies, plus all their trading branches, from both mainland France as well as its overseas departments, territories and dependencies (such as French Guiana, Martinique, Reunion, etc). Given that OpenCorporates is primarily a database of legal entities, we have currently excluded the local trading branches as they are out of scope (although we may revisit this in the future, though it would be on a global, not local level). This first cut also (temporarily) excludes the overseas jurisidictions, while we do further investigations and internal mapping, but we will be adding them in due course. The INSEE dataset from January initially covered just active companies, so we supplemented it with just over 500,000 dissolved companies for 2012-2017 from the open data sourced from Infogreffe (the grouping of chambers of commerce, who actually perform the registration of companies). Combining two such datasets has the potential for causing significant data issues, and so we have performed extensive research on the two, and how they may be combined. Based on this research we found, among other things, that where a company is found in both datasets, the INSEE data tended to be more accurate with regards to the company status, and therefore it has taken precedence over the Infogreffe data for that company…”