Hi everyone!
Here are this month’s highlights for upcoming changes, allowing you to adjust your integration in advance. Please take a minute to review and plan any updates.
Bulk changes to be applied March 16
Taking customer feedback into account, we’re starting to group changes that affect a large number of entities. This way, organizations using our data for monitoring are advised when a large day-to-day delta is expected to occur.
To continuously improve our data product, we cannot entirely avoid data changes. While we believe the changes we make improve the database, making it more precise and easier to use, we also understand the technical challenge of processing large sets of changes.
To that end, we’re grouping these changes so you can expect big differences on one date, two weeks after this bulletin. Here are the changes that will come into effect on March 16, 2026:
Harmonizing PEP to use citizenship, adding wikipediaUrl
For national legislatures, we’ll aim to identify the country that a PEP is linked to using their citizenship property rather than their country or nationality. We also plan to include Wikipedia article links in some PEP profiles. This change will touch more than 200,000 entities.
Properties affected: Person:citizenship, Person:nationality, Person:country
Datasets affected: Multiple PEP datasets, including Wikidata
Stricter thresholds for importing PEPs from Wikidata
We’re going to apply more restrictive filters in how we identify individuals from Wikidata as PEPs. This will remove ca. 3000 PEPs from the database — some of whom are deceased historical figures.
Datasets affected: Wikidata
Trim ZIP+4 to standard ZIP codes
ZIP codes in the US are at least 5 digits, with an optional 4-digit extension for added detail. We’ve decided to normalize on the first 5 for consistency and predictability, and will thus be removing all of the extras.
Properties affected: Address:postalCode
Datasets affected: Mostly Medicare/Medicaid debarment lists
Updated entity IDs in the Türkiye Grand National Assembly dataset
The Türkiye Grand National Assembly dataset will now include birth years for MPs.
Properties affected: Person:birthDate
Datasets affected: Türkiye Grand National Assembly
Upcoming changes
New property: abbreviation (changelog)
Effective date (end of backwards compatibility): 2026-09
A new abbreviation property will store shortened entity names (e.g. ANC, IKEA) separately from full names, allowing more precise matching on acronyms. For backward compatibility, values are currently copied to weakAlias — this backstop will be removed in September 2026. Data users are advised to integrate the new property before then. Support was added in yente 5.1.0.
Format change: statements.csv (changelog)
Effective date: 2026-05
We will remove internal metadata statements (identified by the id property name) from the statements.csv export in May 2026, as they are not part of the data payload and have caused confusion. See the changelog for more.
Migration of billing system to Stripe (changelog)
Effective date: Q1 2026
We are migrating billing for both API and bulk data customers from Chargebee to Stripe. See the changelog or contact Support for more details.
Dataset removals and deprecations
CIA World Factbook — us_cia_world_factbook
Deprecated by source on 4 February, will be removed 16 March. Read more here.
HMT/OFSI Consolidated List — gb_hmt_sanctions
Went into effect 28 January. Replace all dataset references to gb_hmt_sanctions with gb_fcdo_sanctions. See changelog.
Kazakh Terrorist and Terror Financing lists — kz_afmrk_sanctions
No longer accessible from the official source and now deprecated. Will be removed on 31 March. Read more here.
New Datasets
Italy Senate members: it_senate- Finland Parliament members:
fi_eduskunta - Hungary National Assembly members:
hu_national_assembly - Norway Parliament members:
no_storting - Singapore MAS enforcement actions:
sg_mas_enforcement_actions - US BIS Anti-Boycott Enforcement:
us_bis_antiboycott - US BIS Denied Persons:
us_bis_denied - Bosnia and Herzegovina Register of Companies:
ext_ba_companies - Kingdom of Jordan National Sanctions List:
jo_sanctions - Sweden State-Owned Enterprises Leadership:
se_soe
Recent changes
Breaking change: Migration from features to explanations in /match responses (changelog)
Effective date: 2026-03-02
Our two-step migration in the /match API response format that affects users relying on the features and matcher fields is now complete. See the changelog for details, but:
- The
matcherfield in/matchresponses has been removed. Equivalent information is available via the/algorithmsroute (free to use). - The
featuresfield has been removed. Users should have updated their applications to consumeexplanations.
Quick reference
- Data dictionary — Full property and schema documentation
- Changelog — A record of all data and API changes
- Status page — Live service status and incident history
- Crawler planning — See what’s in progress and vote on priorities. Submit new data source requests via the request form or email support@opensanctions.org