FollowTheMoney

Aleph is built on top of FollowTheMoney, a data model for the most common entity and relationship types used in anti-corruption reporting. Aleph allows users to browse, import, and export data in the FollowTheMoney data format. This page explains key concepts of FollowTheMoney.

Entities and schemata

FollowTheMoney defines entity types commonly used in anti-corruption reporting, including people, companies, assets, addresses, etc. In fact, even the files you upload to Aleph are modelled as entities (for example, there are entities representing spreadsheets, emails, and other types of files). An entity can also represent a relationship between other entities, such as a payment or an ownership of a company.

Entity types are also called entity schemata.

Properties

Every entity schema defines a set of properties. For example, the Person schema has a nationality property while the Company schema has a jurisdiction property. Both properties, however, have the same property type, country.

References

There are many different property types, including types for strings, dates or identifiers. There is also a special entity property type which allows entities to reference other entities. For example, the Passport schema has a holder property that references another entity:

graph LR passport("Passport") -- "holder" --> holder("Person")

This also allows modelling more complex relationships:

graph TB acme("ACME, Inc.") john("John Doe") directorship("Directorship Start date: 1996-01-24 End date: 2001-04-01") directorship -- "director" --> john directorship -- "organization" --> acme

JSON

Entities are often serialized as JSON snippets. For example, the example in the section above could be represented as follows:

{
  "id": "acme",
  "schema": "Company",
  "properties": {
    "name": ["ACME, Inc."],
  }
}

{
  "id": "john",
  "schema": "Person",
  "properties": {
    "name": ["John Doe"],
  },
}

{
  "id": "john-acme",
  "schema": "Directorship",
  "properties": {
    "director": ["john"],
    "organization": ["acme"],
  }
}

While Aleph allows you to edit entities via the Aleph UI, you can also read and write entities programmatically in JSON format.

Learn more