Understanding OpenSanctions data

OpenSanctions collects data about political and economic influence and conflict. In order to correctly describe these real-world structures and the risks associated with them, we use a data model focused on the notion of entities.

Entities have various properties, denoting – for example – their name, creation date, and association with one or more countries. They can also use properties to reference other entities, e.g. a Passport entity will link to its holder. Some relationships are entities in their own right: a Person can be linked to a Company via an Ownership entity, which might document further details, like the time period and ownership percentage.

Learn more #

• See Entity structure for detail of the FollowTheMoney data format for entities.
• See the Data dictionary for reference of all available entity types, their possible properties and values.
• See Identifiers and de-duplication for how entity IDs are selected and maintained.
• See Entity risk tagging for how to use this data for common use cases like sanction screening and PEP identification.
• See Dataset metadata for guidance on the descriptions available for each data source in the database.
• See Statement-based data for this more detailed data format providing full provenance linking every property value to its source.
• See the Changelog to follow current and planned evolutions of the data model and metadata structure.