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.
Prerequisites
Before we continue, you will need to have Docker and docker-compose installed. Please refer to their manual to learn how to set up Docker and docker-compose.
Installation
Aleph requires a couple of services in order to operate. To make it easier for development and deployments it uses Docker containers. Below you will find the installation steps on how to install Aleph locally for development and production environment.
Download Aleph
