Search routines

[Cliff Wiernik]

We have to start search the Department of Treasury OFAC/SDN database base, available in a variety of formats, like XML, CSV, delimited, text, and do a search for individuals names/address/birthdates.

Any items on available tools or routines to do fast searching of data in these formats, using exact, fuzzy, phonetic type searches. I see some references to wild seach in the bbs.

Cliff.

[rdonnay]

Cliff -

I developed a complete OFAC search system for Darien Consulting Group.

Aidan Harland sells this system to banks.

See http://darienconsultinggroup.com

He refers to it as Watchlist Scanner.

It's written entirely in Xbase++, Xb2.Net and eXpress++

Roger

[bwolfsohn]

http://www.darienconsultinggroup.com/

works.

does not work w/o the www.

Brian

[rdonnay]

thanks for the correction.

[Cliff Wiernik]

Roger, I have a call into them. However, I don't know that the product is designed to allow seemless integration into our program. We could get the information for free from Experian, which is not our main credit bureau used. The Transunion bureaus make the option available, but the pricing is rather steep on a per request. If it is a hit, we just have another red flag added to our other red flags.

I have looked at the main files that we have to check under the requirements. In the alaska web board, Chris Andries pointed to a submittal under the old Express++ Webboard. Is that still available. It was a user contribution.

Don't want to reinvent the wheel, but a stand alone or batch process would not meet our needs.

Cliff.

[rdonnay]

The code is owned by Aidan Harland.
I wrote it in such a way that it can be integrated into any Xbase++ app.
He may be willing to sell it with source.

[Cliff Wiernik]

Roger,

I talked to Aidan. He will be getting in contact with you to discuss some things. We may be using the SOAP service that access the software from our application. He also discussed potentially taking over the service for the small number of client banks he works with. Just wanted to give you the heads up on this.

Cliff.

[skiman]

Hi CLiff,

My user contribution was to search with wildcards in NTX files.

As far as I understood now, you want to search in a directory of files?

[rdonnay]

Chris -

OFAC is a very specialized application that searches a database based on a DoubleMetaPhone algorithm. The largest difficulty in writing this app was the complexity of acquiring the information to create the database.

The U.S. government requires all banks to check new accounts against at least 12 different lists that are posted on different government websites. These lists are .TXT, .HTML, .CSV and other formats that all need to be downloaded and merged into a common database on a routine basis. The lists contain the names of known and suspected terrorists.

So this isn't just a simple search routine, as the title of the posting suggests, it's a complicated application.

[Cliff Wiernik]

Have discussed with Aidan briefly and will be discussing in more detail.

Our requirements are not quite as expansive in terms of the databases. We need to only check the SDN list at this time based on what our legal tells us. I know the Watchlist program does several and provides the updating for the service.

If we only did this single database, I was looking at search routine options.