openlegaldata / followthelaw

Data model and processing tools for investigative entity data

Follow the Money

This repository contains a pragmatic data model for the entities most commonly used in investigative reporting: people, companies, assets, payments, court cases, etc.

The purpose of this is not to model reality in an ideal data model, but rather to have a working data structure for researchers.

followthemoney also contains code used to validate and normalize many of the elements of data, and to map tabular data into the model.

Documentation

For a general introduction to followthemoney, check the main documentation:

• https://docs.alephdata.org/developers/followthemoney

Part of this package is a command-line tool that can be used to process and transform data in various ways. This is documented here:

• https://docs.alephdata.org/developers/ftm

There's no built-in tooling to render the model metadata (i.e. the list of schemata). However, we can export the schema to RDF (RDF/OWL), the abstract data model behind linked data. There's a number of viewers for the RDF schema definitions generated from FollowTheMoney, e.g.:

• LODE documentation
• WebVOWL
• Raw RDF, XML or Turtle

Releasing

We release a lot of version of followthemoney because even small changes to the code base require a pypi release to begin being used in aleph. To this end, here's the steps for making a release:

git pull --rebase
make test
bumpversion patch
git push --tags

This will create a new patch release and upload a distribution of it. If the changes are more significant, you can run bumpversion with the minor or major arguments.

When the schema is updated, please update the docs, ideally including the diagrams. For the RDF namespace and JavaScript version of the model, run make generate.