CorpWatch Announces Version 2.0 of the CrocTail Corporate Subsidiaries Database and Open API

CorpWatch announces the release of a second version of the CrocTail 
application and open CorpWatch API, developed with support from the 
Sunlight Foundation. 
 
CrocTail (http://croctail.corpwatch.org) provides an interface for 
browsing information about several hundred thousand U.S. publicly traded 
corporations and their many foreign and domestic subsidiaries. 
Information from company Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 
filings has been parsed and annotated by CorpWatch to highlight specific 
corporate accountability issues. The new version includes filings from 
2003 to 2009, and it will be updated every month. CrocTail also serves 
as a demonstration of the features and data available through the 
CorpWatch API (http://api.corpwatch.org). 
 
CrocTail is an extension of the Crocodyl.org Wiki web site project, an 
online compendium profiling the accountability and transparency track 
records of multinational corporations. 
 
By visiting CrocTail, users can search the entire subsidiaries database; 
and see a window displaying known issues with subsidiaries, direct links 
to the root SEC filings, and links to the Crocodyl.org profile; a world 
map pinpointing subsidiary locations; and an expandable subsidiary tree 
for navigating the hierarchy. In this new version, users can click on 
different years and see how subsidiary relationships for a company have 
changed over time. (For example, see Halliburton Co.) The site also has an 
edit mode, making it possible for registered researchers to add value by 
tagging subsidiaries with issues notes which will be automatically 
linked to the parent company profiles. 
 
What does the CorpWatch API do that the SEC doesn't? 
 
Although the SEC website has a search page for locating company filings 
(EDGAR / IDEA), the subsidiary information is not standardized. The 
CorpWatch developers wrote parsers to "scrape" the subsidiary 
relationship information from Exhibit 21 of the 10-K filings, and then 
built an "API" (Application Programming Interface) to provide a 
well-structured interface for web programs to query and process the 
subsidiary data. 
 
Coded by Skye Bender-deMoll and Greg Michalec, the CorpWatch API is 
available free to anyone who registers and abides by the Terms of 
Service. The API is fully documented. Using the API requires enough 
programming knowledge to be able to parse JSON or XML. For more 
information visit: http://api.corpwatch.org. 
 
About CorpWatch 
 
CorpWatch is a non-profit organization dedicated to investigative 
research and journalism to expose corporate malfeasance and to advocate 
for multinational corporate accountability and transparency. We seek to 
expose multinational corporations that that profit from war, fraud, 
environmental, human rights and other abuses, and to provide critical 
information to foster a more informed public and an effective democracy. 
 
Websites: http://community.corpwatch.org, http://www.Crocodyl.org 

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