Frequently asked questions

A collection is a bundle of entities (people, companies, etc.) from multiple data sources. These sources might have a similar topical focus (e.g. international sanctions, regulatory watchlists, or procurement bans). The main collection produced by OpenSanctions (and available via our API) is called default. See a list of available collections.

When screening entities using the matching API or advanced search page, users can limit the results to entities appearing in a specific collection. When integrating our bulk data, we recommend using the default collection and filtering entities based on risk tags or what collection or dataset they appear in. See our documentation on using bulk data and why you probably don't want to use our peps collection