Do you still remember the massive Panama Paper leak in 2016? When 13.4 million financial documents were released in this November, the offshore paradise islands got global attention again. Paradise Papers cover the time period from 1950 to 2016, including the more than 120,000 people and 25,000 offshore companies.
Tech-savvy readers can jump to the database directly. Like before, the dataset is modelled as a graph, namely treating the Officers, Intermediaries and Addresses as nodes and their relationships as links. Neo4j is one widely adopted graph database. Its web user interface, called “neo4j browser”, allows journalists to visually expand and explore a graph. The query language “Cypher” is a superset of relational query (SQL), full-text search and graph pattern matching. Its flexibility and built-in graph algorithms allow experienced journalists to systematically study the underlying graph. The download page on ICIJ includes snapshots of four neo4j databases exported in CSV format.