Open PermID Provides Free Access to Thomson Reuters-Linked Data

Thomson Reuters, one of the world’s leading sources of intelligent information, has launched Open PermID, a set of APIs and tools that organizations can use to access Thomson Reuters’ massive core entity data set. Open PermID provides access to Thomson Reuters-linked entity data via bulk downloads, hypermedia APIs, and online tools.

PermID is a machine readable, 64 bit number used to create a unique reference. Thomson Reuters has been using PermID for quite some time to improve internal data federation providing a single common context for the information stored in silos across the company’s many divisions. Thomson Reuters is now making PermID and its linked entity data publicly available for free. Available entity identifiers include organizations (companies, government agencies, universities, etc), instrument data, and quote data.

There are currently three Open PermID APIs; Record Matching, Entity Search, and Open Calais Tagging. The Open PermID Record Matching API Track this API allows organizations to match their own entity data to Thomson Reuters identifiers. The Open PermID Entity Search API Track this API provides access to permanent ID’s from the core entity data set which, according to the official website, includes “3.5 million organizations, 240K equity instruments and 1.17 million equity quotes.” The Open PermID Open Calais Tagging API Track this APIprovides access to the free version of Thomson Reuters Intelligent Tagging, a platform that uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to automatically analyze and tag unstructured content.

Thomson Reuters Open PermID APIs are hypermedia APIs available in several types including Collection+JSON, JSON-LD, and Turtle. There are code samples available on the Open PermID developer site including Java, .NET, PHP, Python, and JavaScript (languages vary for each API). Here is an example of a browser API call and the JSON response: