---
title: "Removing unused source identifiers in referents"
url: "https://www.opensanctions.org/changelog/27/"
id: "27"
date_created: "2025-08-08T13:00:38.550Z"
date_effective: "2025-10-15"
breaking: false
categories: ["Data model","Export formats"]
---

# Removing unused source identifiers in `referents`

Starting October 15, 2025, we are planning to remove out-of-use [entity identifiers](/docs/identifiers/) from the `referents` list after a grace period. At present, the `referents` associated with entities include all IDs of source entities that have been used to describe the entity in the past, including those no longer present in our dataset. This has lead to over 100,000 entity IDs mentioned in `referents` which are no longer associated with any source data. In the future, we plan to remove ("garbage collect") unused `referents` after ca. **6 months**.

Users of the data may need to **update monitoring systems in which `referents` is used to suppress repeat alarms** for a matched entity in a screening system. When an entity ID is changed and moved to `referents`, consumer systems should update their internal reference to the main (canonical) entity ID when drift is observed.