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📘

September 2024 (v27.2) is a Minor Release

Since January 2022 (v17), PDL has been releasing data updates every month with a major release every quarter. Minor releases (such as v26.2) typically contain fewer product updates or key changes, but still contain important data improvements

v27.2 was released on September 3, 2024.

**Welcome to our September 2024 release notes! ** We have exciting updates to share this month:

Here are the key highlights:

• Improvements to our Stock Ticker data and new Stock Ticker fields for public subsidiaries in our Company Dataset
• Exciting additional company data improvements (including improvements to our inferred_revenue estimates and easier parent / subsidiary aggregations)
• Big increases in the quality and coverage of our mobile phone data
• Decreased the number of low-quality data records in our email and phone datasets as a result of our QA improvements

Excited yet? Read on to learn more, or jump to a specific section using the table of contents below.

Table of Contents

📣 Key Announcements

• Schema Changes
  • New Stock Ticker Fields

❗Breaking Changes (Going Live This Month)

• ⚠️ Upcoming Breaking Changes
  • New Job Title Taxonomy
  • Location Country Enum Updates
  • Company Type Enum Change

✨ New Products and Features

• Company Data Improvements

🚀 Data Updates

• Freshness
  • Job Changes
• Coverage
• Commentary

🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvements
• Bug Fixes

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📣 Key Announcements

Schema Changes

New Stock Ticker Fields (Company Schema)

This month, we are adding two new stock-ticker fields to our Company Data Schema. The ultimate_parent_ticker and ultimate_parent_mic_exchange are designed to make it easier to search the Company Dataset for all the subsidiaries of a particular parent company. These fields will be populated for company records who are public subsidiaries. In our next major release (v28.0) those records will also be tagged with type=public_subsidiary.

These new fields are available in our Premium and Comprehensive field bundles, and are immediately provided to current customers using those bundles. To get access to these field bundles, please reach out to your Customer Success team.

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❗Breaking Changes (Going Live This Month)

⚠️ Upcoming Breaking Changes

🚧

Upcoming Breaking Changes

Upcoming breaking changes in future versions may impact your current processes. We are announcing them here to provide ample time for you to adjust your processes accordingly.

⚠️ New Role and Sub Role Job Title Taxonomy (Person / Company / IP)

Change expected in: v29.1 / February 2025 Previous Announcements: v26 / April 2024, v27.0 / July 2024

Products Impacted: Person / Company / IP Schema

As announced in our July 2024 release notes, we are in the process of revising our job_title_role and job_title_sub_role enums by implementing a new job role taxonomy. This breaking change will impact customers using any of the fields in the table listed above.

Last month, we opened up beta access to our updated taxonomy along with a migration guide to support customers through the transition to the new taxonomy. We strongly encourage customers to participate in the beta release before the GA launch in October. As a reminder, all customers must be fully transitioned to the new taxonomy by February 2025 (v29.1).

The full timeline is shown below:

Timeline

Given the scope of the changes, our goal is to provide clear visibility on the process and ample opportunity to work through this transition together. The expected timeline for this release is as follows:

[✅] V27.0 (July 2024) - Breaking Change Announcement and Resource Launch:

• Public notice of our planned role / subrole transition and initial resources provided

[✅] V27.1 (August 2024) - Beta:

• Beta access is now available for the new role / subrole taxonomy which includes a new data field title.class
• Customers are now able to test sample data through our Technical Services team to explore the new taxonomy and the potential data impacts
• We have released a guide documenting our recommended best practices for transitioning to the new taxonomy with the beta release as well

V28.0 (October 2024) - General Availability:

• We will make the new role / subrole taxonomy generally available for all customers and begin the deprecation process for the previous taxonomy
• Customers can opt in to accessing the new taxonomy via API and flat file deliveries (but will have the option to delay transitioning until their systems are updated)

[Upcoming] V29.1 (February 2025) - Final Deprecation:

• We will fully deprecate and officially end support for the previous taxonomy
• All new and existing customers will be moved onto the new role / subrole taxonomy.

Resources

Please use the following resources to better understand the upcoming changes and to start preparing for the transition. As always, reach out to your Customer Success and Technical Services teams for questions and support.

[✨NEW] Migration Guide: A document that walks customers through transitioning their codebase and datasets to the new taxonomy is here:

• Breaking Changes Guide: v27.1 Role / Subrole Taxonomy Migration

Migration Table: A spreadsheet that explicitly maps each role and sub_role from the previous taxonomy to the new taxonomy is here:

• Migration Table for New Role / Sub_Role Taxonomy [Post-v27.1]

The new set of canonical classes, roles, and subroles is here:

• Job Title Class [post-v27.1]
• Job Title Roles [post-v27.1]
• Job Title Subroles [post-v27.1]
• Mapping of Job Title Class to Roles to Subroles [post-v27.1]

Sample records using the updated role / subrole taxonomy are here:

• Example Person Record [New Role / Subrole Taxonomy]
• Example Company Record [New Role / Subrole Taxonomy]
• Example IP Record [New Role / Subrole Taxonomy]

⚠️ Location Country Enum Updates

Change expected in: v28.0 / October 2024 Previous Announcements: v27.0 / July 2024

Products Impacted: Person / Company / IP Schema

In October 2024, we will be updating the set of canonical countries values to better accommodate geographical renamings as well as correct redundancies in our set of country values.

This change is part of an ongoing effort to improve our overall location standardization process within our data. As such it will impact the location country values in our Person, Company and IP datasets.

The updated set of country values that will be released in v28.0 is here:

• Location Countries [post-v28.0]

In addition a mapping from the current country values to the upcoming country values can be found here:

⚠️ Company Type Enum Change

Products Impacted: Person / Company Schema Previous Announcements: v27.0 / July 2024

Change expected in: v28.0 / October 2024

Next month, we will be updating the set of canonical company type values to include a new public_subsidiary value in the set of canonical values:

This change is part of the now-released effort to improve our coverage of stock ticker fields and how we enable customers to roll up Company Insights information to public companies. The addition of the public_subsidiary company type specifically is intended to help provide customers a mechanism to easily filter and pull all public companies and their subsidiaries.

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✨ New Products and Features

Company Data Improvements (Company Schema)

This month, we are excited to release a series of improvements to our company data:

Stock Ticker Improvements We’ve improved the accuracy of our stock ticker and stock ticker exchange fields across our company dataset. This fixes some data quality issues in previous builds, but more importantly also allows us to more regularly update and refresh this information, providing better coverage of recent changes to public companies. Furthermore, we now provide more reliable stock ticker information for companies trading on multiple exchanges by prioritizing US exchanges and primary tickers.

inferred_revenue Improvements As part of these improvements, we also updated our methodology for estimating inferred_revenue ranges for companies in addition to incorporating public SEC data more strongly into our predictions. While our previous revenue estimation approach was regarded very positively by customers, we have seen meaningful improvements as a result of these updates.

Easier Parent/Subsidiary Aggregations Our new ultimate_parent_ticker and ultimate_parent_mic_exchange fields make it easy to search the PDL Company dataset for all the subsidiaries of a particular parent company. For example, it is now possible to use our Company Search API to query for all the subsidiaries of a public company like Apple by using the search criteria ultimate_parent_ticker=AAPL. Additionally, our new public_subsidiary company type enum makes it easy for users to identify private companies that are owned by public companies in our dataset.

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🚀 Data Updates

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September 2024 (v27.2) is a Minor Release

As a reminder, September 2024 is a minor release. This means that the information reported below is based off of the last one month of updates (rather than the 3 months of updates we typically report for the major releases).

Freshness

The number of jobs and locations verified in our datasets over the past month (based on the job_last_verified and location_last_updated fields).

Job Changes

The number of person records where the primary job experience changed in our Person Dataset over the past month (based on the job_last_changed field).

Coverage (Full Stats: Person, Company)

Resume Dataset

Email Dataset

Phone Dataset

Mobile Phone Dataset

Company Dataset

Commentary

• We saw a >16% increase in our coverage of stocker tickers and >20% increase our coverage of exchange-related information in our company dataset as part of our stock ticker improvements this month.
• We saw a significant increase in our coverage of mobile phone information across both the resume (7%) and mobile phone datasets (15%). This increase in coverage was despite our purging of low quality phone numbers from our datasets and build sources (see Improvements section below).
• The Phone and Email datasets saw significant decreases in records as a result of the removal of low-quality data sources identified through our mobile phone QA updates.
  • We made the decision to remove these sources since most of the lift they provided was outdated data (e.g. earthlink.net emails, historic addresses, and home phone numbers)
  • We were also observing a material number of inaccuracies in the data

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🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

Improvements

• We no longer allow generic work emails (e.g. “[email protected]) to be in the primary work_email field.
• We made several improvements to our mobile phone data including a removal of numbers not registered to mobile phones and removing a source of low-quality mobile phone data from our build.
• As noted above, we improved our accuracy of stock tickers and ticker exchange fields in our company dataset and improved our build process to enable more frequent and accurate updates to these fields.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed a bug where PDL legacy company LinkedIn URLs were being selected over the current LinkedIn URL.
• We fixed a bug where experience objects with a start_date before the founding date of a company were being nullified (e.g. Ivan Zhao, founder of Notion, was missing his experience at Notion).