Identification and Visualization of Corporate Structure: A Preliminary Investigation

Interpreting corporate reports has largely remained the domain of accountants, corporate lawyers and analysts. As we have unfortunately witnessed, even the best representatives of these groups can be mislead by opacity in reporting and corporate structures. As mergers and acquisitions, foreign investment and other activities complicate the corporate landscape, constituents of all skill levels should be entitled to clear explanations of events and decisions that potentially affect shareholder value. We are actively in the process of developing several approaches and tools to automate the extraction of certain types of corporate information and to present this data in a useful fashion. In this paper we will outline the major steps involved in automating the extraction of corporate subsidiary information and will demonstrate several approaches for visualizing subsidiaries and their relationships.