Data Breakdown

This website provides access to two interconnected databases:

• Instance Database: Each entry represents a single mention of a company or person in a specific source.
• Entity Database: Each entry represents a consolidated company or person, aggregating all known mentions across instances.

The data focuses primarily on Switzerland and Great Britain, reflecting its origin in research on chambers of commerce in these regions.

Instances are classified both geographically and economically. Entity records inherit and aggregate this information from all associated instances. For example, if one instance links Company A to Basel and another to Zurich, the corresponding entity record will include both locations.

The dataset spans the years 1920 to 1958. The advertisement corpus and the trade indexes—the largest component—are distributed across this period, though not evenly. A pronounced peak occurs in 1951, driven by the inclusion of a Special Trade Index for that year. 

The distribution shows the frequency of location mentions within the dataset. Basel and Zurich appear most often, followed by Lausanne and Geneva. London is the most frequently occurring location outside Switzerland.

All values represent counts of occurrences in the corpus and do not indicate economic importance or real-world prominence.

The chart shows the most frequently occurring economic sector classifications in the dataset, based on WZ 2008 categories. “Unclassified” entries are the most common and typically indicate that no economic sector was specified in the source.

Among the classified entries, sectors such as damage and accident insurance, wholesale trade without a defined focus, freight forwarding, and the production of dyes and pigments appear most frequently. All values represent counts of occurrences in the corpus.