chpy 0.0.2

Build networks from the Companies House API

chpy

A wrapper for the UK Companies House API, with tools for network analysis built on networkx.

Notes

This tool enables users to build a corporate network from information on the UK Companies House API. If you're reading this, you're looking at the very first version which has been published, which probably means that I know you. Hello! It's still a very early version, full of cheap bug-fixes, and poorly-documented and thoroughly un-PEP8 code, but it's published. Yipee! Please feel free to mess around with what you have here, and provide feedback on anything you encounter.

usage

This tool is currently intended for use alongside a Jupyter notebook, and I've provided a sample in the "example" directory. I believe that most users will want to do with this is simply build a network from a company that they have interest in.

from chpy.build import *

# You'll need your own API key from Companies House and to load
# it as a variable in Python.
with open('API_KEY.txt') as f:
    api_key = f.read().strip()

get_company_network("01467092", api_key)

chpy outputs three objects to ./data/you_company_number:

• One node list in csv format
• One edge list in csv format
• One graph in gexf format, for use with gephy or similar

A word of warning

This is very much still in development, and due to the way Companies House (CH) data is maintained and structured a degree of caution is required when using this tool. Notably:

• CH does not maintain information on companies that have been wound up for a certain (I think five years) period of time.
• Similarly, inactive officers are not always available.
• This software makes extensive use of fuzzy matching to build links between companies and officers, due to the limitations of the unique identifier system used by the CH API.
• The system is designed to be conservative with the relationships it builds, requiring date of birth (if available) and location matches, and as such may miss relationships if a strong match isn't found.