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grano: facebook, for terrorists!
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grano is a web-based framework for the storage, analysis and presentation of social network information. The tool provides building blocks for custom, data-driven investigative solutions.

Many types of interactions between people, organisations and institutions can be understood in terms of network structures. This makes for an apt metaphor for the distribution of political, social and economic influence. grano is aimed at journalists, activists and researchers who want to explore and explain such structures.

What is grano used for?

The focus of grano is its reusabilty for a wide variety of scenarios. Currently, the following services are based on the tool:

.. image:: _static/openinterests.png

  • OpenInterests.eu <http://openinterests.eu>_ explores who has financial and political interests in the institutions of the EU. The site combines information from various official databases into a unique catalogue.

  • nomenklatura <http://opennames.org>_ is a data cleaning service that helps to de-duplicate and link entity names in raw data. The next version of this service will be a part of grano.

A toolkit for understanding networks

grano is not intended as a stand-alone solution. Rather, the software can be seen as a toolkit that can help to build bespoke interfaces that ideally match the domain that needs to be explored. To support the analysis of such structures, grano provides a set of services:

  • A basic network data store with custom configurable schemata for any use case.
  • A rich :ref:webapi which can be used to query and manipulate the data.
  • Full lineage tracking for all properties of entities and relations in the graph.
  • Canonicalization and aliasing of entities in the network ("BP" is also known as "British Petroleum").
  • Full-text search and faceting for entities in the network.

In the future, the following additional services will be available:

  • A web-based property editor for graph entities and relations.
  • Computation of graph metrics and aggregate reports based on entity properties.

Contents

.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2

technical install schema plugins rest_api rest_client bulk_api

Related projects

The idea behind grano is not new, and a number of similar services have served as an inspiration:

  • LittleSis <http://littlesis.org>_, tracks people, companies and their connections in the United States.
  • Poderopedia <http://poderopedia.org>_, tracks connections between people and companies in Chilean politics.
  • detective.io <http://detective.io>_, allows journalists to build their own data models for investigations, then fill them.

Many other tools are listed in the SNA survey <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AplklDf0nYxWdFhmTWZUc0o0SzAzMkRuMTZCUVBVeHc&usp=drive_web#gid=0>, and some analysis of the different approaches can be found on the Knight Labs' Untangled <http://untangled.knightlab.com/> site.

grano aims to fill a niche in this domain by providing an easily re-usable, well-documented solution that can handle bulk data imports and messy data particularly well.

Contributors

grano is a free software project hosted by Code for Africa <http://www.codeforafrica.org/>_. It relies on contributions from people like you, so please contribute any improvements as pull requests on GitHub, or create an issue to discuss them first.