Visualizing Corporate America

The Freebase blog posted a visualization of data about the network of american companies. This example displays the connection between companies based on shared board members. The data for the visualization is available and features:

• 60,000 people who are directors or high-level employees at public companies
• Headquarters and industry codes for 7000 companies
• The complete NAICS tree of industries, with mappings to companies
• Revenues and income amounts for 5000 companies, as of their latest 10-K filings
• Approximate market capitalizations for 5000 companies, as of the end of 2007

Freebase is also providing sample queries in MQL to get you startet extracting data and revealing dependencies, causes or effects.

If you haven’t already come across Freebase I let the official website describe the superb service:

Freebase is an open database of the world’s information. It is built by the community and for the community — free for anyone to query, contribute to, built applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.

Freebase uses data from various large datasets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz or the above-mentioned SEC to become a huge social database.

“They Rule” is a interactive visualization created with Adobe Flash that is based on the same data.