Corporate information, including basic company firmographics (e.g., name(s), incorporation data, registered addresses, ownership and related entities), financials (e.g., balance sheets, ratings) as well as contextual data (e.g., cadastral data on corporate properties, geo data, data about directors and shareholders, public tenders data, press mentions) are the foundation that many data value chains are built on. Furthermore, this type of information contributes to the transparency and accountability of enterprises, is instrumental input to the process of marketing and sales, and plays a key role in many business interactions. Existing initiatives to increase the interoperability and access of corporate data are mostly fragmented (across borders), limited in scope and size, and silo-ed within specific business communities with limited accessibility from outside their originating sectors and countries. As a result, collecting and aggregating data about a business entity from several public sources (be it private/public, official or non-official ones), and especially across country borders and languages is a tedious, time consuming, error prone, and very expensive operation which renders many potential business models non-feasible. euBusinessGraph represents a key initiative to simplify and disrupt the cross-border and cross-lingual collection, reconciliation, aggregation, and provisioning and analytics of company-related data from authoritative and non-authoritative public or private sector sources, with the aim of enabling cross-sectorial innovation. By a combination of large companies, SMEs, public organizations, and technology transfer providers euBusinessGraph sets the foundations of a European cross-border and cross-lingual “business graph”, aggregating, linking, and provisioning (open and non-open) high-quality company-related data, demonstrating innovation across sectors where company-related data value chains are relevant.

The “Once-Only” Principle Project (TOOP) explores and demonstrates the “once-only” principle through multiple sustainable pilots, using a federated architecture on a cross-border collaborative pan-European scale in order to identify drivers and barriers and to provide a basis for future implementations and wider use. Three pilots are implemented: (1) Cross-border e-Services for Business Mobility, (2) Updating Connected Company Data and (3) Online Ship and Crew Certificates. TOOP has the ambition to connect 59 information systems from 21 countries. The methodological approach of TOOP is based on an exploratory and agile pilot life-cycle approach to cross-border pilots, the planning and implementation of which is supported by the development of a generic federated architecture and building blocks, the identification and mitigation of barriers, including legal issues, and the evaluation of the results, with pro-active dissemination and sustainable exploitation of the results throughout the project. TOOP’s main technological innovation is a generic federated OOP architecture that supports the interconnection and interoperability of national registries at the EU level. The pilots planned are ambitious as they contain innovations and provide a basis for recommendations for future implementations and the wider use of the OOP. The project is an important learning environment for OOP in particular and European e-Government in general. The pilots are scalable and can be extended to all Member States in subsequent years. TOOP’s consortium of 51 organisations consists of 19 national administrations (or authorized thereby) from 19 different EU Member States and 2 Associated Countries. The public administrations provide effective piloting, research partners make sure that the key preconditions for effective piloting are met, and private entities support exploitation, all complementing each other in the whole range of activities and areas dealt with in TOOP.