Canadian patent database holding information on over 2,000,000 patents and over 2,000,000 people and organizations involved in patent licencing has been added to LandOfFree.com.
US Patents database
After number of months of hard work, we have added the database of US patents, inventors, representatives, assignees, attorneys and examiners to uspatents.LandOfFree.com. We allow visitors to rate patents and inventors/organizations using six criteria.
The database contains patents registered in US after 1970. In total there are over 4 million patents and over 3 million people/organizations. The data is publicly available at Google patents beta.
Processing this dataset has been a challenging task. The raw data comes in a variety of formats that have to be parsed. The amount of data when unpacked is over 2 Terabytes. Once processed, some interesting quick numbers* can be immediately noticed:
- Number of Inventors: 2,661,498
- Number of Representatives: 37,538
- Number of Assignees: 34,139
- Number of Corporate Assignees: 395,044
- Number of Attorneys: 38,466
- Number of Law Firms: 25,792
- Number of Examiners: 61,961
Financial Institutions in USA
We have added listing with all USA financial institutions and their branches. The list includes active and inactive institutions. There are over 27000 financial institutions and more than one million branches.
Canadian Corporations
We are proud to announce listing of Canadian corporations and corporate directors at LandOfFree. You can access it at canadiancompanies.landoffree.com. If you are looking for a business contact, a new employer, a new employee, or if you are/were employed at a certain company – find a company on this web service. Are you looking for a director or a contact person? Check our lists. We are also trying to help Canadian businesses to promote themselves and to make them more transparent for general public. We hope to improve business culture in Canada.
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Ontario Public Sector Salary Disclosure 2011
I have just added 2011 Ontario Public Salary Disclosure data to Land Of Free. If there is enough interest I might pull out some interesting statistics such us histogram of salaries, etc. All suggestions are welcomed.
Why we should (not) insist on government transparency?
Hello, we live in the 21st century! I can track my FedEx package in a second. Pay my bills online. I can tweet about my washroom dumps and the whole world will share the experience with me instantaneously. Hell, I could also post my sh** on youtube and update my facebook account from my iphone. I can connect to people from all over the world in a blink of an eye. But I cannot find out where and how my tax money is being spent. I would like to be able to track every single cent of my government’s budget. I would like to be able to see and analyze data on the salaries being paid to public servants and the amounts given by the government to various contractors. I would like to have access to information on goods and services used by ministries. Everything: from reimbursed Tim Horton’s coffee up to the exact cost of the 2009 automobile industry bailout. As an honest taxpayer I expect certain service for my work. Most Canadians go to work every day for almost half of the year just to pay taxes. We give almost half of our work hours to the government for certain services. I would like to be able to overview the use of our hard earned money.
Continue reading “Why we should (not) insist on government transparency?”