Frequent questions about yente

Common issues experienced while deploying and operating yente.

yente: Intro · Deployment · Settings · Custom datasets · FAQ

How often is data in yente API updated?

The self-hosted API is - by default - configured to check for new OpenSanctions data releases every 30 minutes (cf. YENTE_SCHEDULE). New data releases are published several times a day.

If new data is available, an indexing process will be started, and requests will switch to the new data once it is fully searchable (ca. 15 minutes).

How does yente update its data?

Here is a very quick tour of how yente works:

  • When the application starts, it will download a metadata file from data.opensanctions.org which states the latest version of the OpenSanctions data that was been released.
  • If there is fresh data, it will create an ElasticSearch index with a timestamp that match the latest release of the data (e.g. yente-entities-all-00220221030xxxx).
  • It will then fetch the latest data from data.opensanctions.org (a 500MB+ JSON file) and store it onto the /tmp volume of the container.
  • Once the data is downloaded, it will read entity data from the file and push it into ElasticSearch in small batches.
  • When all the data is indexed, yente will create an ES index alias from yente-entities-all to the latest snapshot of the index (e.g. yente-entities-all-00220221030xxxx) and delete all older snapshots of the index.
  • Only once this has completed will the /search and /match APIs work correctly. On the plus side, any future updates to the data will be indexed first, and the switch-over to the new data will be instantaneous.

All my HTTP requests return index_not_found_exception, what's wrong?

This probably means that the initial index-building (described above) never completed. Check the following:

  1. That the machine you are running the indexer/yente app on is able to fetch data via HTTPS from data.opensanctions.org.
  2. That a temporary, timestamped index (see above) was created in ElasticSearch (which means indexing has at least begun).
  3. That the final yente-entities-all was created. If a timestamped index was created, but the final alias does not exist, it likely means that indexing was aborted half-way. This could be because a) the downloaded data could not be fetched or stored in its entirety, b) the indexing of entities was aborted, perhaps due to a lack of system memory or compute time.

While debugging this issue, you can use http://yente-service:8000/updatez?token=UPDATE_TOKEN&force=true to trigger a forced re-index of the data at any time. The UPDATE_TOKEN is a secret token you can define in the environment of the yente pod using the YENTE_UPDATE_TOKEN variable.

Can I select a specific subset of datasets to match against?

In some cases, you may want to customise the set of datasets which a query is to search, e.g. to select only a subset of relevant datasets. You can use the custom datasets to do this by adding a manifest file like this:

catalogs:
  - url: "https://data.opensanctions.org/datasets/latest/index.json"
    # Limit the dataset scope of the entities which will be indexed into yente. Useful
    # values include `default`, `sanctions` or `peps`. This will speed up the update
    # process in which data is re-indexed.
    scope: sanctions
    resource_name: entities.ftm.json
datasets:
  - name: europe
    title: European datasets
    datasets:
      - eu_fsf
      - eu_travel_bans
      - eu_sanctions_map
      - be_fod_sanctions
      - fr_tresor_gels_avoir
      # - gb_hmt_sanctions

This will create a new dataset collection named europe, which can be used in query endpoints, e.g. /match/europe and /search/europe. Please note that the other datasets included in the sanctions collection will still be stored in the index and attributes originating from those sources will be included in the person and company profiles. If your use cases requires building a completely custom dataset, please contact us.

Why is it called yente?

yente makes you a match.


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