Follow the Money

Underneath all of the Aleph tools is Follow the Money, a data model for the most common entities and link types of anti-corruption reporting. Aleph tools browse, import or export this data.

The Follow the Money data model is designed to organise concepts which arise in money laundering and corruption investigations in a way that is useful to investigative journalists.
Follow the Money is both the name of the data model, and of a command-line tool used to generate and process data formatted using this model. Aleph is an interactive viewer on top of a search index of Follow the Money entities.
Schema
The data model of Follow the Money consists of so-called schemata, i.e. object types. They exist as an inheritance hierarchy, rooted in things and intervals. You can also think of these as entities and events.
Things
Things describe most of the real-world objects represented in Aleph and Follow the Money. This includes People and Companies, Assets and Court Cases. While normally generated by the file ingestion service of the Aleph server, a large set of sub-types of Documentis creating through entity mappings.
Things (or nodes) include People, Companies, Documents and similar entity types.
Intervals
Intervals are business interests, court cases, sanctions and transactions (and their descendents). Intervals tend to be useful for linking two entities together, possibly over a specific time period.
Intervals are temporary in nature, and often define a relationship between two or more things, e.g. a membership in an organisation, or a family association.
Browsing the schema
If you wish to browse the Follow the Money data interactively, we recommend using the RDF-based ontology version that is generated here. It can be used to drive interactive data explorers in multiple formats, including:
The LODE documentation browser (great for reading)
A network visualisation of the ontology provided by WebVOWL.
Data format
Instances of Follow the Money entities are usually expressed as snippets of JSON, with three standard fields: an id, a specification of the schema to be used, and a set of properties. All properties are multi-valued.
{
    "id": "1b38214f88d139897bbd13eabde464043d84bbf9",
    "schema": "Person",
    "properties": {
        "name": ["John Doe"],
        "nationality": ["us"],
        "birthDate": ["1982"]
    }
}
Such entities are either generated by mapping structured data, or through the file ingestion process of Aleph.
Property types
Property types constrain the possible values of a field, e.g. by limiting what countries are valid, what a phone number and email address look like, etc. They are also used to compare how similar values of the same type are, i.e. the algorithm for comparing two names is not the same as for two phone numbers.
Name
Description
Strong
string
General purpose string field
no
text
Long-form text field. Data stored in this type will be processed for named entity recognition (NER) in Aleph.
no
name
Name of a company or person
yes
address
Street address, formatted as a simple text
yes
checksum
SHA1 of an underlying data asset (i.e. the source file for an Email entity)
yes
country
Country code, ISO 3166 with some additions
yes
date
ISO 8601 date prefix, e.g. 2009, 2009-03-01, or 2009-03-01T22:34:00
yes
email
E-mail address, must contain an @
yes
entity
Reference to another entity by its ID
yes
iban
International Bank Account Number (IBAN), ISO 13616
yes
identifier
Generic identifier, e.g. a company or tax registration number
yes
topic
Semantic classification of entity, out of a fixed set.
no
ip
Internet host address, v4 or v6
yes
json
Nested JSON object - rarely used
no
language
ISO 639 three-letter code
no
mimetype
Internet MIME type, e.g. text/plain
no
number
Numeric value, usually converted to floating point number
no
phone
Phone number, including an international dialling prefix
yes
url
Uniform Resource Locator, internet address path
yes
Schema definitions
The individual entity types (schemata) within the Follow the Money data model are defined using a set of YAML files. This model can be extended or modified for other deployments of Aleph to some extent, but this process is not very well established.
Follow the Money is reminiscent of a linked data ontology, and indeed it is regularly published in Turtle and RDF/XML format for use in RDF-based applications. See the ftm export-rdf documentation for help on how to export Follow the Money data to linked data.
Proposing changes
Any user of Aleph should feel free to propose changes or extensions to the Follow the Money data model by submitting a GitHub issue. Proposed changes should embody the design sense of the data model, which prioritises practicality over correctness; understandability over standards compliance. 
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Name	Description	Strong
`string`	General purpose string field	no
`text`	Long-form text field. Data stored in this type will be processed for named entity recognition (NER) in Aleph.	no
`name`	Name of a company or person	yes
`address`	Street address, formatted as a simple text	yes
`checksum`	SHA1 of an underlying data asset (i.e. the source file for an Email entity)	yes
`country`	Country code, ISO 3166 with some additions	yes
`date`	ISO 8601 date prefix, e.g. 2009, 2009-03-01, or 2009-03-01T22:34:00	yes
`email`	E-mail address, must contain an @	yes
`entity`	Reference to another entity by its ID	yes
`iban`	International Bank Account Number (IBAN), ISO 13616	yes
`identifier`	Generic identifier, e.g. a company or tax registration number	yes
`topic`	Semantic classification of entity, out of a fixed set.	no
`ip`	Internet host address, v4 or v6	yes
`json`	Nested JSON object - rarely used	no
`language`	ISO 639 three-letter code	no
`mimetype`	Internet MIME type, e.g. text/plain	no
`number`	Numeric value, usually converted to floating point number	no
`phone`	Phone number, including an international dialling prefix	yes
`url`	Uniform Resource Locator, internet address path	yes