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 documents (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 search across large document and data sets.
- Imports many file formats, including popular office formats, spreadsheets, email and zipped archives. Processing includes optical character recognition, language and encoding detection and named entity extraction.
- Load structured entity graph data from databases and CSV files. This allows navigation of complex datasets like companies registries, sanctions lists or procurement data. Import tools for OpenSanctions. are included.
- Receive notifications for new search matches with a personal watchlist.
- OAuth authorization and access control on a per-source and per-watchlist basis.
Documentation
The documentation for Aleph is available on our Wiki. If you wish to run your own copy of Aleph (or contribute to the development), get started with the installation documentation.
Support
Aleph is used by multiple organisations, including Code for Africa, OCCRP and OpenOil. For coordination, please join the Aleph slack workspace: alephdata
If you find any errors or issues using Aleph please file an issue on GitHub or contact the mailing list.