A hands on introduction to Aleph, the data tool that enables OCCRP's cross border investigations 🇬🇧

### Overview Jan Strozyk, co-head of the Data and Research team at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), introduces Aleph—an open-source data analysis and investigation platform developed by OCCRP. OCCRP is an investigative journalism organization focused on organized crime, corruption, money laundering, and cross-border follow-the-money investigations. Strozyk explains that investigative reporting and OSINT workflows often involve massive volumes of leak data, scanned files, and databases. Aleph is designed to perform the heavy lifting below the waterline: ingesting, organizing, indexing, and cross-referencing structured and unstructured data so investigators can rapidly surface actionable findings.

### Key Topics - **Structured vs. Unstructured Ingestion**: Handling unstructured files (such as scanned court records, PDF dumps, emails, dark web leak materials, and Word documents) alongside structured tabular datasets (such as SQL dumps, scraped company registers, bank transfers, and flight/vessel tracking data). - **Follow The Money (FtM) Data Model**: Normalizing disparate data into standardized entities and properties (such as persons, companies, assets, and ownership relationships) to enable cross-dataset querying. - **Search and Cross-Referencing**: Leveraging advanced query features including proximity searching, cilic/Latin script handling, transliteration, synonym/nickname mapping, metadata extraction, and automated cross-referencing against hundreds of public and private databases. - **Private Investigations & Entity Mapping**: Creating custom investigation workspaces to upload raw archives, run OCR, map CSV spreadsheets into entities and relationships, and visualize connections. - **Aleph Ecosystem & Architecture**: Deploying Aleph via open-source software, automating scrapers using the Memorious framework, and integrating via Python libraries and REST APIs.

### Technical Details - **Entity Mapping & Schema**: Aleph structures all information using the Follow the Money (FtM) ontology, which defines entities (like companies and individuals) and intervals/relationships (edges connecting subjects and objects, such as corporate ownership or shareholdings). This normalized structure allows cross-referencing across separate leaks, historical dumps, and public registries. - **Search Features & Ingestion Pipeline**: The platform supports full-text search, Boolean/proximity syntax (e.g., `Vladimir ~2 Putin`), entity-type filtering, and automatic regex parsing for IBAN numbers, phone numbers, and addresses. It also handles transliteration between scripts (e.g., Cyrillic to Latin). - **OCR & Document Extraction**: Scanned documents and images inside uploaded archives (e.g., ZIP archives containing emails or IDs) are processed using Tesseract OCR, with user-selectable language flags to optimize processing speed. - **Visualizations**: Users can construct interactive network graph diagrams showing connections between individuals and corporate entities, manually edit or link nodes, and view events across an experimental timeline view. - **Tooling and Extensibility**: OCCRP uses the Memorious scraping framework (combining YAML pipeline configurations with Python scripts) to ingest continuous updates from approximately 150 scrapers. Developers can also interact with Aleph programmatically via its API and Python client.

### Real-World Walkthrough & Security Strozyk demonstrates a real investigation based on a 2023 cafe explosion in St. Petersburg. By taking the cafe's registered domain name from public reporting, extracting the corporate taxpayer ID via WHOIS, and querying Aleph, investigators linked the venue to the Russian company Concord M, identified Yevgeny Prigozhin as the primary owner, and uncovered 197 Russian state procurement contracts within five minutes.

Regarding platform usage and legal risks, OCCRP restricts access levels: while an open public instance exists, sensitive leak archives are restricted to vetted journalists and researchers to mitigate legal liabilities, defamation claims, and lawsuits. Uploaded user investigation spaces remain private by default, with role-based sharing options for collaboration.

### Takeaways Aleph provides an end-to-end open-source solution for cross-border data journalism and OSINT investigations. By normalizing unstructured leaks and corporate records into the Follow The Money data model, it turns disorganized document dumps and spreadsheets into searchable, cross-referenced intelligence graphs.