Extract network graph as a ftm file from Aleph?

Support
1

Hi all! Thanks for adding me to the discourse. I’m backing up some investigations and would like to store once ingested material locally. I already figured out, how to export entities from Aleph to a json file via alephclient.

However, is it possible to extract a network graph as a .ftm file - through alephclient or other means?

Thanks so much for looking into this.

Best, Marvin

2

Hi Marvin,

this alephclient command should allow you to write a list of entities in a given network graph to a JSON file:

alephclient entitysetitems --outfile entities.json <entityset_id>

You can extract the entity set ID from the network diagram’s URL. For example, in the URL https://aleph.occrp.org/diagrams/123abc, the entity set ID would be 123abc.

Note that this will give you only a list of the entities in the diagram, but it doesn’t include information about the layout (positions, colors, …). If you need that as well, you might want to take a look at the Aleph API, but unfortunately it’s not straight forward to get it as a single file.

Hope this helps!
Till

3

Thank you, Till, for the swift response! That’s really kind! - The alephclient command helped already, great idea!

Links between entities are set via souceID and `targetID’, I assume?

I mean, having the networks as a single file, would be great, but where to start with Aleph API?

4

Hey, so in the output of the alephclient command, the links between entities will be implicit. Consider this example diagram:

Screenshot 2025-07-21 at 16.18.27
Screenshot 2025-07-21 at 16.18.27768×350 22.7 KB

When you run alephclient entitysetitems …, you will end up with a JSON file that contains three entities:

{ "id": "1", "schema": "Person", "properties": { "name": ["John Doe"] } }
{ "id": "2", "schema": "Company": "properties": { "name": ["ACME Inc."] } }
{ "id": "3", "schema": "Directorship": "properties": { "director": ["1"], "organization": ["2"] }

(I left some parts of the JSON output that aren’t relevant.)

The link is the third Directorship entity – links are just entities and the source and target of the link are determined by the values of its properties.

In case of the Aleph API: Yes, sourceId and targetId (in layout.edges) refer to the source/target entities of an edge.

If you can, mabye share a little bit about what you’re trying to achieve. That would be helpful to suggest an approach for solving your problem. Do you just want to make a copy of your network diagrams? Do you want to migrate them to a different Aleph instance? Or do you want to import your diagrams to a different software?

1 Like
5

Thanks for planning this out for me! Coming from a less hardcore coding background my idea was simple:

I figured that there is a .ftm file ingest built in Aleph, that works really great. So I figured, exporting some of the network graphs as a ftm file for back up purposes, maybe moving them or distributing them to none-aleph users, e.g. via Aleph Data Desktop (I know it’s deprecated, but for some cases it still works fine).