RSSChangelog

We have added a new name matcher, ofac, which emulates the public OFAC Sanctions List Search tool at sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov, with mismatch qualifiers layered on top.

As a consequence, we will be retiring the name-based and name-qualified algorithms in January 2027, since the new ofac algorithm does what name-based originally set out to do.

Once retired, any /match calls using name-based or name-qualified will automatically start using ofac instead.

Please check that your configuration supports HTTP status 307 redirects for HTTP requests to data.opensanctions.org. Starting in August, the site may redirect users attempting to fetch a specific data export to an updated location.

The canonical location will now be at /artifacts/<dataset>/<version>/, where previously a mix of datasets/latest/<dataset> and /datasets/YYYYMMDD/<dataset> were used.

The goal of this change is provide immutable locations for each data export, helping to more clearly identify versions of the dataset.

Only users of our yente on-premise solution are affected by this change. Users of our Hosted API are not affected.

Elasticsearch 9 was released in April 2025, and the end of maintenance for version 8 is January 15, 2027. On-premise customers who are using Elasticsearch need to upgrade their Elastic server to version 9 before January 15, 2027. Current versions of yente are already compatible with both version 8 and 9 of the Elastic server, but yente 5.4.0 released in May 2026 is the last version compatible with Elastic server 8. You can find information on how to upgrade a standard single-node setup of Elastic in our documentation. For more advanced setups, please refer to the official Elastic documentation.

We recommend that on-premise customers perform this upgrade together with one of their upcoming upgrades of yente.

After releasing the new logic-v2 result scoring algorithm in September, we're planning to make it the default used by the OpenSanctions API service when no other algorithm is specified (or the best algorithm is selected). API users can prepare for this change in two ways:

• Adopt logic-v2. The new system significantly reduces false positive alert rates and improves match quality. We also plan to make this new algorithm the focus of future feature enhancements and precision improvements.
• Specify algorithm=logic-v1 as part of your query string to opt out of this change. This will freeze the use of logic-v1, the current best/default algorithm. This option is recommended for API users where scoring changes may require a regulatory approval/notification. We may choose to fully retire logic-v1 within the next 24 months.

Please feel free to reach out to the support team with any questions regarding the new scoring algorithm.

Suspended: After receiving feedback from our customers, we have decided to reverse this decision. The cutoff parameter has been marked as deprecated, but will remain in place indefinitely. The announcement below is only retained for reference. It will not be implemented.

In an effort to simplify our Matching API, we are removing the cutoff parameter. Once this change becomes effective, only matches, i.e. those results scoring higher than threshold will be returned. If you care about low-scoring results being returned, please adjust the threshold parameter instead. The match property on the returned results will remain and function as before, and match will be set to true for all results once this change becomes effective.

We have begun a two-step migration in the /match API response format that affects users relying on the features and matcher fields.

1. The matcher field in /match responses will be removed after February 27, 2026. Equivalent information is available via the /algorithms route (free to use).

2. A new explanations field has been added that is a strict superset of features. In addition to the partial scores produced by each component of the matching system, it includes textual descriptions of the matching decisions from each of these subsystems. These descriptions are designed for display in analyst workbenches or can be passed to generative AI tools to help interpret screening alerts. The features field will be removed after February 27, 2026. Users should update their applications to consume explanations before this date.

Due to excessive bandwidth use, we are planning to limit access to historical data exports of our sanctions data (pre-2024). Bulk data customers and non-commercial users can request authenticated access by contacting our support team.

The following URL paths will become access-controlled:

• https://data.opensanctions.org/datasets/2021*
• https://data.opensanctions.org/datasets/2022*
• https://data.opensanctions.org/datasets/2023*
• https://data.opensanctions.org/graph/*

We kindly ask all users that retrieve bulk data extracts from data.opensanctions.org to ensure that the HTTP clients used to fetch bulk files are configured to support redirect response codes such as HTTP 302 (Found), 303 (See other), and 307 (Temporary Redirect).

Background: as our archive grows, we may need to virtualize some of our content delivery, or put in place redirects for deprecated locations within the data archive.

We will officially end support for yente 3.x at the end of March 2025. This means we will be unable to provide support for this version, and will not guarantee that new versions of the data will be correctly and completely loadable by the old application release.

To ensure continued compatibility and access to the latest features, we strongly encourage all users to upgrade to the latest version. For detailed instructions on upgrading, visit our documentation page on upgrading yente.

This release updates various dependencies, introducing new fields in the followthemoney schema and bringing in security patches for the web stack dependencies.

We're also implementing the Reconciliation API's Data Extension protocol for the first time, allowing users to enrich OpenRefine tables with new columns using the API.

See more: https://github.com/opensanctions/yente/releases/tag/v4.2.0

yente 4.1.0 (release page) is a minor patch release. It introduces clearer error reporting during index runs, and fixes the number of matches reported in the total section of the /match API. Various dependencies have been updated to their latest version, including followthemoney.

This change is relevant for users of the index.json and catalog.json metadata. API and yente users as well as those users who download static files based on location are not affected.

As the number of datasets in the default collections grows, the metadata size is becoming a factor: the main index file is now larger than two megabytes. In order to prevent scaling issues in the future, we're splitting up the dataset metadata into two files: index.json and statistics.json. index.json will contain fewer summary facts about each dataset. The extended statistics (e.g. the number of entities in the dataset linked to each country) will be in the more in-depth statistics.json.

The following fields will be removed from dataset metadata:

• schemata
• properties
• targets (and all nested items)
• things (and all nested items)

These fields continue to be published in a statistics.json file. A statistics.json file is published with each data export of a dataset, and referenced from the index.json via the statistics_url field.

Additionally, the following fields will be removed in favor of replacements that are already in index.json:

• sources - use datasets instead
• externals - use datasets instead