ComputerWorld reports how International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) used graph technology to uncover an international banking fraud.
Traditionally, reporters have to try and spot relationships between data in Excel files, conduct manual Internet searches and sometimes physically draw out connections between people and entities to get the right facts for their stories. It would have taken years for the two to unravel the data. This is where the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) came in.
The leaked data included information from account holders in over 200 countries and had a collective account total of over $100 billion. The challenge was to find a solution to analyze and visualize that data without the need for data scientists. This is where a graph database solution came in.
“While working on stories like Offshore Leaks, I learned how important graph analysis is when investigating financial corruption,” said Mar Cabra, editor of the Data and Research Unit at the ICIJ. “Connections are key to understanding what the real story is: they show you who’s doing business with whom. We decided early on that we needed to use a graph-based approach for the HSBC Leaks.”
Keywords: HSBC • icij • international consortium of investigative journalists