Simplified CSV (comma-separated values) table

CSV exports of the source data are intended to be used for high-level analysis or the import into legacy systems.

The tabular data export is targeted at analysts who wish to access the OpenSanctions data in a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel (help: open CSV in Excel).

Unfortunately, the structure of persons of interest data does not easily lend itself to a simple tabular form. For example, a person might have multiple nationalities, or have been a member of several political parties in their career.

There are countless ways to generate CSV excerpts from OpenSanctions. If you would like to work with us to build an export format that's ideally suited for your use case, please get in touch.

Data dictionary

The "Simplified CSV" format addresses this by presenting a highly limited view of the data, in which only a select set of key columns is provided. These include:

Column	Description
`id`	The unique identifier of the given entity.
`schema`	Entity type (eg. Person, Company).
`name`	The preferred name of the given entity.
`aliases`	All names (e.g. other scripts, nom de guerre) provided by the data sources.
`birth_date`	For people, their birth date.
`countries`	List of countries; includes countries of residence, nationalities and corporate jurisdictions.
`addresses`	List of known addresses for the entity.
`identifiers`	Identifiers such as corporate registrations, passport numbers or tax identifiers linked to this sanctions target.
`sanctions`	Details regarding the sanctions designation, if any.
`phones`	List of phone numbers linked to the entity, in E.164 format.
`emails`	List of email addresses linked to the entity.
`dataset`	List of dataset names that provide source data for this entity.
`first_seen`	Earliest date this entity has been noticed by OpenSanctions.
`last_seen`	Most recent time this entity was observed in source data.
`last_change`	Most recent time the checksum of the values in this entity has changed.

Technical notes:

The CSV is formatted using , (comma) as a delimiter, encoded as utf-8.
Some fields in the CSV can contain multiple values in one cell. These are stored as a nested CSV using the ; (semicolon) delimiter.
The export contains only targeted entities, not all entities in the dataset.

Statement-based CSV format

You may also be interested in our statement-based CSV exports, which provide a high-fidelity way to import provenanced OpenSanctions claims into a system.

Got more questions? Our support is here to help. You can also join the Slack chat to meet the community.

Understanding the data

Entity structure

Data dictionary

Identifiers and de-duplication

Matcher training data

Statement-based data

Data enrichment