Simplified comma-separated values (CSV) table

CSV exports of the source data are intended to be used for high-level analysis or the import into legacy systems.

The tabular data export is targeted at analysts who wish to access the OpenSanctions data in a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel (help: open CSV in Excel).

Unfortunately, the structure of persons of interest data does not easily lend itself to a simple tabular form. For example, a person might have multiple nationalities, or have been a member of several political parties in their career.

There are countless ways to generate CSV excerpts from OpenSanctions. If you would like to work with us to build an export format that's ideally suited for your use case, please get in touch.

Data dictionary

The "Simplified CSV" format addresses this by presenting a highly limited view of the data, in which only a select set of key columns is provided. These include:

ColumnDescription
idThe unique identifier of the given entity.
schemaEntity type (eg. Person, Company).
nameThe preferred name of the given entity.
aliasesAll names (e.g. other scripts, nom de guerre) provided by the data sources.
birth_dateFor people, their birth date.
countriesList of countries; includes countries of residence, nationalities and corporate jurisdictions.
addressesList of known addresses for the entity.
identifiersIdentifiers such as corporate registrations, passport numbers or tax identifiers linked to this sanctions target.
sanctionsDetails regarding the sanctions designation, if any.
phonesList of phone numbers linked to the entity, in E.164 format.
emailsList of email addresses linked to the entity.
datasetList of dataset names that provide source data for this entity.
first_seenEarliest date this entity has been noticed by OpenSanctions.
last_seenMost recent time this entity was observed in source data.
last_changeMost recent time the checksum of the values in this entity has changed.

Technical notes:

  • The CSV is formatted using , (comma) as a delimiter, encoded as utf-8.
  • Some fields in the CSV can contain multiple values in one cell. These are stored as a nested CSV using the ; (semicolon) delimiter.
  • The export contains only targeted entities, not all entities in the dataset.

Statement-based CSV format

You may also be interested in our statement-based CSV exports, which provide a high-fidelity way to import provenanced OpenSanctions claims into a system.