Friedrich Lindenberg

Friedrich Lindenberg leads the data team at OCCRP. He is responsible for the development of OCCRP Data and supports ongoing investigations where data analysis is needed. In 2014/2015, Friedrich was a Knight International journalism fellow with the International Center for Journalists, working with the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), and in 2013 he was a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellow at Spiegel Online in Hamburg. Prior to that, Friedrich was an open data activist, and worked to promote the release of government information about public finance, lobbying, procurement and lawmaking across the world.

2019 Talk: Using graphs and data integration to track organised crime

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) is a network of investigative reporters in over 45 countries, working on projects such as the Panama Papers or the Global Laundromat. Data tooling has emerged as a key factor in investigative reporting, and various projects aim to use graph data systems for the analysis of offshore company ownership, money laundering or state capture.

OCCRP has developed the open source Aleph system, and the FollowTheMoney ontology as key components for processing data from both structured databases and unstructured sets of documents. While these technologies toy with the notions of data integration and linked data, they are also intended to make the best of the limited resources available to members of our industry. Using both open data and confidentially sourced information, we have built one of the largest data engines of our industry, combining ca. 500mn entities from 600 data sources.

We’d be keen to present our architecture and experiences from the field in order to get feedback from the academic community and search for cooperation, technology and data sharing.