philmcmahon
commented
2 years ago Hey @ninoppp - thanks for raising this issue! Tagging my colleagues @itsibitzi and @joelochlann who should be able to help with some of the differences between Aleph and Datashare as they've got more experience of using these other platforms and might have a better idea of the pros/cons of each vs giant.
In terms of whether I'd recommend giant to a small media organisation, the main thing is that I think you would be the first external organisation to use giant. This would be exciting for us and we'd love to help you get it set up - but it may not be a smooth journey! You may find the Aleph/Datashare docs are more complete - in particular Aleph has been open source from the beginning as far as I know so there's a greater chance their documentation is tried/tested by external users. From a technical perspective, Giant currently uses both Neo4j and elasticsearch databases which can be a challenge to manage - though you can use managed versions of these too to reduce the maintenance effort.
Giant was originally designed with a focus on being able to ingest data as fast as possible. It has an ingestion pipeline that can scale horizontally in order to boost performance. This was based off the guardian's experience of other investigations where getting data in front of journalists as fast as possible was essential.
One defining feature of giant which is coming (very) soon hopefully is the ability to search for text and then view the text highlighted in place - see https://github.com/guardian/giant/pull/38 - with Aleph/Datashare my understanding is that it is common to need to download documents rather than viewing/searching within the platform.
Re the 'platform for investigations' question - this is the only open source tool in the suite...for now! Originally giant was called 'pfi' with the idea that it would include multiple different tools, whrereas now it is focussed on searching/sharing documents securely.
Both Aleph and Datashare have versions you can quickly try out I think! For giant we could potentially give you a demo on a zoom call at some point if you're interested.
ninoppp
pirhoo
Rosencrantz
Hey there
I'm currently checking out different platforms for investigations to set up for a small organization. While we're doing local testing, I'd also like to ask you directly:
What are the main differences between Giant and the two main alternatives? Which features do the others not have, which ones is Giant missing? Why are you maintaining Giant instead of using Datashare or Aleph? Would you recommend it to a small media organization?
Thanks for bothering :)
Edit: another question: You mention a Platform for Investigations suite. I did not find any other tools belonging to that sute publicly, is Giant the only open source one?