Graphing Companies House Data

Years ago, when politics was a more hopeful place, and not just a competition between the leading tepid wet blanket proto-fascists, I did some work on opposition research for a cause I believed in.

This led to building this tool to graph companies house relationships using GraphViz.

I recently updated the tool to work with the updated companies house api, so I published it to GitHub

Example: Example Graph

See the full rendered graph here: Rendered Graph

Installation

Clone the repo at: GitHub

Install Graphviz:

This depends on your OS

Then install the Python dependencies in a venv or equivalent (google this if you don't know how):

pip install -r requirements.txt

Companies House API Key

You'll need a companies house api key. You can get this by registering an application with Companies House in their developer portal

See: https://developer.company-information.service.gov.uk/get-started

Usage

python ch_parser.py 
    -u URL  # The URL of the base officer you're looking at - e.g https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/zvMsdSrp3DBpbynbh7l5mg9MlPI/appointments
    -k APIKEY # a Companies House API key
    [-d DETECT] # Detect service companies with large numbers of links - 'true' or 'false' (default faulse)
    [-n NUMBER] # The number of links to detect a service company - default 250

Files will be in the /output directory