This is Lena Zúñiga, I'm the new project coordinator for the EDGAR Mashup project.   Ian has done a great job starting up this initiative and after a few months of refining the proposal, we're very excited and very proud to announce that we have started the technical development phase of our EDGAR database Mashup project, supported by the  Sunlight Foundation.

Our technical team, formed by Skye Bender-DeMoll and Greg Michelec, is now refining a first version of the API.  We expect to have a functioning demo by April this year.  

As you've read before in this space, the aim of the EDGAR/Mashup project is to create an open database of parent/subsidiary relationships among all publicly traded companies registered with the  U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission  (SEC). The data will come from sub-files that make up part of the 10-K annual filings that all publicly traded firms must submit to the SEC.

This project is full of interesting challenges, for example, overcoming pulling data that is not always uniformly formatted together into one database. We are having conversations with other projects that are focusing on similar data sets, so we can eventually present our data together. These are all great projects that are doing valuable work to make corporate data widely available:

• Littlesis.org  publishes profiles of influential, powerful people in government and different industries.

• Maplight.org  helps users visualize the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes.

• FedSpending.org  provides site users with full spending data for federal contracts.

• Freebase.com  is a community-based, open database of the world's information covering millions of topics in hundreds of categories, including corporations.

If you'd like to send us feedback and comments about the EDGAR/Mashup project,  please do so. We'll be posting periodic updates on its status.