Norwegian business data – Making it easy to use

Why Company Data Matters

Your Data Business – Series, Issue #5

We spoke with Bjørn Grøva. Bjørn is Senior Advisor at Brønnøysundregistrene (BRC). The public sector agency plays a key role in making life simpler for business and industry in their dealings with the authoritative business registries in Norway. The register gets its name from the town Brønnøysund in Nordland where it is located.

Bjørn, why is company data so important for BRC?

Providing authoritative data (which is most accurate and serves as the reference) about Norwegian companies is BRC’s core business.

What has BRC worked on lately?

We made incremental refinements to the BR-S web service to make it more usable. The service provides access to authoritative business data from Norway. The major new feature is a query which lists the change of legal entities since a particular date. We have also documented the service in OpenApi Specification 3.0 format.

Bjørn, could you tell us what’s in it for me as a customer?

If you are doing business, if you are an intermediary or if you are a public agency it will be much easier and less costly to use data from BRC once the  BR-S APIs are in full swing. The goal is to create an API service for modern access to four (currently disconnected) major Norwegian authoritative public sector registers – the Central Coordinating Register for Legal Entities, the Register of Business Enterprises, The Registry of Company Accounts, and Registry of State Aid.

How does your work make a difference?

As a government agency supplying authoritative data, it is a major concern for us to make sure everybody uses correct and up-to-date information. The BR-S service makes it easier to obtain this information. In particular, the new “changed legal entities” function makes it easier for users with dumps or copies of the Register of Legal Entities to keep their copies updated.

Shows the user interface for searching in the Legal Entities Register service. This image shows an example search result.

Could you tell which challenge lies ahead of you?

We aim to get as transparent as possible. Still, there are both legal and commercial concerns that complicates publishing certain types of information, e.g. company officers and annual accounts.

Bjørn, do you have any final thoughts you would like to share with us?

We are always interested in suggestions for improvement to the BR-S service. In particular, feedback from non-Norwegian users are very much welcome, as they might face additional challenges in understanding and using our data.

Currently, data from the Central coordinating register of Legal Entities and the Register of state aid (also accessible in English) isavailable:

  • Central Coordinating register of legal entities: GUI // API description
  • Register of state aid (ROFS): GUI // API description