
Written by: Muhammad Zulhusni, Journalist, AOPG.
When the Pandora Papers news broke out last year, it shook the world. The major leak dominated headlines across the world and reported that the Pandora Papers discoveries came from a vast quantity of data: 2.94 Terabytes in all, 11.9 Million records and documents dating back to the 1970s.
How do you even manage such a large amount of data? Well, it’s tough considering the fact that data volumes are increasing.
“In 2019, we had about 40 Zettabytes of data – that’s equal to a Trillion gigabytes – it’s a mind-boggling number. In 2020, it was 50 Zettabytes of data. The numbers aren’t out yet for last year but it’s predicted that we had about 75 Zettabytes of data,” Dr Maya Natarajan, Sr. Director, Knowledge Graphs, Neo4j said at a recent webinar titled, “The Pandora Papers: Exposing Financial Crime with Graph Technology.”
She claimed that we are dealing with a new generation of data, one that is complex rather than simple. And graph technology is the only type of technology that can manage relationships or be referred to as “connected data,” thus all of these different types of complex data can only be used by graph technology.
“In a graph database like Neo4j, data and relationships are stored together – that means that related nodes are physically linked in the database, so accessing those relationships is as immediate as accessing the data itself,” she said.
She also mentioned that with a graph, all you have to do is read the relationship from storage, which makes it very quick. And querying the graph is as straightforward as traversing or walking it.
As she explained the benefits of what graph technology can do, she also stated, “Try this with any other type of technology and you’ll fail! Other technologies just can’t handle relationships at all. Maybe the SQL or relational type of databases can but it’s an uphill battle to actually analyse relationships with a SQL or relational database.”
Have you noticed how much Dr Maya speaks about relationships? The reason for this is that relationships are crucial because they connect data and provide context. Data with context, according to Dr Maya, is extremely powerful because it allows us to make complex decisions with confidence.
“You could have data in disparate sources and not have a clue whether a piece of data in an email is connected to data in a legal document for instance. That’s where graph technology comes into play. It brings data together and helps identify those relationships that may be obvious but more often than not, it identifies relationships that are not so obvious,” she explained.
This is particularly useful in investigative journalism when you’re looking for any suspicious links between the many players in your data. It’s also what makes graph technology such an essential tool in the fight against fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes.


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