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Developing a crawler

Note

Please consult the contribution guidelines before developing new crawlers to learn about inclusion criteria for new data sources.

A crawler is a small Python script that will import data from a web origin and store it as entities as a source dataset <datasets>. The basic process for creating a new crawler is as follows:

  1. File a GitHub issue to discuss the suggested source
  2. Create a YAML metadata description for the new source
  3. Create a Python script to fetch and process the data
  4. Address any data normalisation issues the framework might report

In the future, an additional step will be required to link up duplicate entities against other sources and to define canonical/merged entities.

Source metadata

Before programming a crawler script, you need to create a YAML file with some basic metadata to describe the new dataset. That information includes the dataset name (which is normally derived from the YAML file name), information about the source publisher and the source data URL.

The metadata file must also include a reference to the entry point, the Python code that should be executed in order to crawl the source.

Create a new YAML file in the path opensanctions/metadata named after your new dataset. By convention, a dataset name should start with the ISO 3166-2 code of the country it relates to, and name parts should be separated by underscores. The contents of the new metadata file should look like this:

Warning

The dataset metadata format is going to be subject to significant change.

title: "Financial Sanctions Files (FSF)"
url: https://eeas.europa.eu/

# The description should be extensive, and can use markdown for formatting:
description: >
   As part of the Common Foreign Security Policy thr European Union publishes
   a sanctions list that is implemented by all member states.

# The Python module that contains the crawler code:
entry_point: opensanctions.crawlers.eu_fsf_demo

# A prefix will be used to mint entity IDs. Keep it short.
prefix: eu-fsf

# Define what collections the source is part of. All sources are added to a
# magical collection called 'all'. Each collection also has its own YAML 
# metadata file, but the link between a source and the collections it is a
# part of is established via the source metadata, not the collection metadata.
collections:
   - sanctions

# This section provides information about the original publisher of the data,
# often a government authority:
publisher:
   organization: European Commission
   authority: European Union External Action Service
   acronym: EEAS
   country: eu
   url: https://eeas.europa.eu/topics/sanctions-policy/8442/consolidated-list-of-sanctions_en

# Information about the data, including a deep link to a downloadable file, if
# one exists.
data:
   url: https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/europeaid/fsd/fsf/public/files/xmlFullSanctionsList_1_1/content
   format: XML

Once that YAML file is stored in the correct folder, you should be able to run command-line operations against the dataset, for example (if your metadata file is named eu_fsf_demo.yml):

$ opensanctions run eu_fsf_demo
....
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'opensanctions.crawlers.eu_fsf_demo'

That error will be addressed in the next section, by adding a crawler script.

Developing a crawler script

In order to actually feed data into the data source, we need to write a crawler script. The script location is specified in the YAML metadata file as entry_point:. This also means you could reference the same script for multiple data sources, for example in a scenario where two data sources use the API, except with some varied parameters.

In our example above, we'd create a file in opensanctions/crawlers/eu_fsf_demo.py with a crawler skeleton:

def crawl(context):
    context.log.info("Hello, World!")

Running the crawler (opensanctions crawl eu_fsf_demo) should now produce a log line with the message Hello, World!

You'll notice that the crawl() function receives a :pycontext <opensanctions.core.context.Context> object. Think of it as a sort of sidekick: it helps you to create, store and document data in your crawler.

Fetching and storing resources

Many crawlers will start off by downloading a source data file, like a CSV table or a XML document. The :pycontext <opensanctions.core.context.Context> provides utility methods that let you fetch a file and store it into the crawlers working directory. Files stored to the crawler home directory (context.path) will later be uploaded and published to the web.

def crawl(context):
    # Fetch the source data URL specified in the metadata to a local path:
    source_path = context.fetch_resource('source.xml', context.dataset.data.url)
    with open(source_path, 'r') as fh:
        print(len(fh.read()))

    # You can also register the file as a resource with the dataset that
    # will be included in the exported metadata index:
    context.export_resource(source_path, title="Source data XML file")

Other crawlers might not be as lucky: instead of fetching their source data as a single bulk file, they might need to crawl a large number of web pages to collect the necessary data. For this, access to a pre-configured Python requests session object <requests:session-objects> is provided:

from lxml import html

def crawl(context):
    response = context.http.get(context.dataset.data.url)

    # Parse the HTTP response into an lxml DOM:
    doc = html.fromstring(response.text)

    # Query the DOM for specific elements to extract data from:
    for element in doc.findall('.//div[@class="person"]'):
        context.log.info("Element", element=element)

Responses from the context.http session are cached between different runs of the crawler and will be cached for up to 10 days. You can partially disable this by adding a timestamp parameter to the fetched URLs.

Creating and emitting entities

The goal of each crawler is to produce data about persons and other entities of interest <entities>. To enable this, the context provides a number of helpers that construct and store entities <entities>:

def crawl(context):

   # Create an entity object to which other information can be assigned: 
   entity = context.make("Person")

   # Each entity needs a unique ID. In OpenSanctions, this is often derived
   # from the ID of a source database, or a string:
   entity.make_slug('Joseph Biden')

   # Assign some property values:
   entity.add('name', 'Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.')
   entity.add('alias', 'Joe Biden')
   entity.add('birthDate', '1942-11-20')

   # Invalid property values ('never' is not a date) will produce a log
   # error:
   entity.add('deathDate', 'never')

   # Store or update the entity in the database:
   context.emit(entity, target=True)

The entity object is based on the entity proxy in FollowTheMoney, so we suggest you also check out the FtM documentation <followthemoney:api> on entity construction. Some additional utility methods are added in the :pyentity class <opensanctions.core.entity.Entity> in OpenSanctions.

Checklist

When contributing a new data source, or some other change, make sure of the following:

  • You've created a metadata YAML file with detailed descriptions and links to the source URL.
  • Your code should run after doing a simple pip install of the codebase. Include additional dependencies in the setup.py. Don't use non-Python dependencies like Headless Chrome or Selenium.
  • The output data for your crawler should be Follow The Money objects. If you need more fields added to the ontology, submit a pull request upstream. Don't include left-over data in an improvised way.
  • Include verbose logging in your crawler. Make sure that new fields or enum values introduced upstream (e.g. a new country code or sanction program) will cause a warning to be emitted.
  • Bonus points: your Python code is linted and formatted with black.

Using the context

opensanctions.core.context.Context

opensanctions.core.entity.Entity

Type lookups

TODO