Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too. - The Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges
aleph is a tool for indexing large amounts of both unstructured (PDF, Word, HTML) and structured (CSV, XLS, SQL) data for easy browsing and search. It is built with investigative reporting as a primary use case. aleph allows cross-referencing mentions of well-known entities (such as people and companies) against watchlists, e.g. from prior research or public datasets.
Here's some key features:
- Web-based UI for search across large document and data sets.
- Watchlist editor for making custom sets of entities to be tracked.
- Equal support for structured (i.e. tabular) and unstructured (i.e. textual) sources.
- Importers include a local filesystem traverser, web crawlers and a SQL query importer.
- Document entity tagger (regular expressions-based, and optionally using NLP).
- Support for OCR, unpacking Zip/RAR/Tarballs, language and encoding detection.
- Entity watchlist importers for OpenNames and Investigative Dashboard.
- OAuth authorization and access control on a per-source and per-watchlist basis.
- Excel export for search result sets.
- Ability to generate graph representations of entity co-occurrence.
The documentation for aleph exists in the project wiki. Please refer to:
- Installation with Docker and in development mode.
- Usage for loading data and maintaining the system.
- For a conceptual overview, refer to the glossary.
aleph is used by multiple organisations, including Code for Africa, OCCRP and OpenOil. For coordination, the following Google Group exists: aleph-search
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2014-2016 Friedrich Lindenberg
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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