Frequently asked questions

You can find answers to the most common questions about OpenSanctions here, including detailed information about the structure of the database, the commercial product, and technical details of the API and bulk data.

Concepts

What is an entity?
What is a dataset?
What is a collection?
What is an entity of interest?
What is a target?
What is a politically exposed person (PEP)?
What is dataset coverage?

Data structure

How does the nested format represent entity networks?
How are entity captions used?
Does OpenSanctions use the same identifiers as Wikidata?
Does OpenSanctions include beneficial ownership data?
What does "last change" indicate?

Bulk data

How can I download the bulk data?
How often is OpenSanctions data updated, and can we know the exact time of updates?
How can I receive incremental updates of the data?
Does the data contain securities identifiers (ISINs) and ticker symbols for companies?
If I run the published source code, will it rebuild the full database?

API

What uses of the API are metered and cost money?
Is there an API for matching entity lists against OpenSanctions?
Should I use the /match or the /search API?
Can the API absorb a high request volume?
When do I use the /entities endpoint?
When do I use the /search API?
Why do results in the /match and /search endpoints not include relationships?
How can I tune scoring to reduce false positives?
What is the API key quota, and how can I change the quota?
Can I select a specific subset of datasets to match against?
Can I embed OpenSanctions entity profiles as an iframe?

yente

How often is data in yente updated?
How does yente update its index?
All my HTTP requests return index_not_found_exception, what's wrong?
How can I use Amazon's OpenSearch as a backend for yente?
To run yente in a secure environment, what outside access does it need?
Why is it called yente?

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FAQ Understanding the data

Entity structure

Data dictionary

Identifiers and de-duplication

Political positions

Entity risk tagging

Using the bulk data

Matcher training data

Using the matching API

Configure result scoring

OpenSanctions is free for non-commercial users. Businesses must acquire a data license to use the dataset.

Use the API License in bulk