UPDATE:  See here for more details... Corporations often escape scrutiny of the most eggregious offenses because their actions are not easliy trackable by average citizens. Parent company/subsidiary relationships are often unknown, save to those with access to expensive and proprietary databases. By adapting visualization software such as Prefuse into a Drupal module, a large database of unwieldy government information can be made accessible and intuitive for activists and citizens to interact with.

The visualization would illustrate the relationships of who-owns-who in the global corporate landscape and shed light on the often dizzying maze of shell companies used to displace liability and avoid corporate accountability.

This is an important project to take on as a mashup, because it needs to pull live data as opposed to a static dataset or a well written report. The pace of buy-ins and sell-outs is so high that only a live feed of data could aggregate and track the voluminous sources from regulatory institutions and keep this information up to date.

Because we would devlop this module as part of the popular open source content management system, Drupal, it would be freely available and adaptable to not only CorpWatch, but anyone who wanted to use the software for their Drupal website.

We would also publish our data in a format that allows other organizations to build an API on top of it.