April 5, 2016 - The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists used Neo4j, the world's leading graph database technology, to unearth what's hailed as the world's biggest- ever financial leak story.
Neo Technology, creator of Neo4j, the world's leading graph database, has just announced that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has used its technology to unearth The Panama Papers – an exposé of offshore tax haven activity of many members of the global elite.
The Papers expose the internal operations of one of the world's leading firms in incorporation of offshore entities, Panama-headquartered Mossack Fonseca. The 2.6 Terabytes of data that make up the files were obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with Washington-headquartered ICIJ, a network of independent reporting teams around the world, and more than 100 media partners, including The Guardian and BBC TV's Panorama programme, which ran a special programme about the scandal last night.
Key to not just this scoop but a number of its other major investigations is Neo4j – the graph database technology with the Linkurious graph visualisation platform that is being used to organise and access this highly connected data, as it did for its last major finance data scoop, Swiss Leaks.
The reason: Graph databases excel at managing highly connected data and complex queries. Instead of using 'tables' the way a relational database does, graphs use special structures incorporating nodes, properties and edges to define and store data, making them highly proficient at analysing the relationships and any interconnections between data — and allowing journalists to 'follow the money' easier than ever.
Unprecedented volumes of highly connected data
According to Mar Cabra, the ICIJ's Data and Research Unit Editor, using Neo4j was the only solution available to meet her requirements. "It's a revolutionary discovery tool that's transformed our investigative journalism process," she confirms, "because relationships are all important in telling you where the criminality lies, who works with whom, and so on. Understanding relationships at huge scale is where graph techniques excel."
"At least 11.5m documents, and far larger than any data leaks we have investigated before, we needed a technology that could handle these unprecedented volumes of highly connected data quickly, easily and efficiently."
"We also needed an easy-to-use and intuitive solution that didn't require the intervention of any data scientist or developers, so that journalists around the globe would work with the data, regardless of their technical abilities. Linkurious Enterprise was the best platform to explore this data and to share insights in a secure way. Using the Linkurious graph visualisation platform with Neo4j is a powerful combination," she adds.
According to Neo Technology's co-founder and CEO Emil Eifrem, "Whatever else we can be sure of as the 'Panama Papers' scandal unfolds, it's only with world-class tools like Neo4j and Linkurious that world- class investigation of vast and complex datasets like this can happen in our Information Age."
"Graph databases are the only option when trying to make sense of the vast terabytes of connected data that we are producing more and more of, and are an essential tool for international agencies, governments, financial services and security firms trying to uncover the truth."
Neo4j customer Mar Cabra will be updating you on this story as it unfolds when she speaks at Europe's biggest graph event, Neo4j's GraphConnect Europe, on Tuesday 26th, at the QEII Centre in Westminster.
She will also be available for press interviews at a pre-GraphConnect Europe Media Reception in London on Tuesday, 25 at St Martin's Lane Hotel, 5-6.30pm.
