Registers and directories
Sources whose entries the case notebook keeps as records.
- NPPES NPI Registry
The US register of National Provider Identifiers for healthcare providers. SkeleTrace searches individual providers by exact name and keeps practice locations only.
- Wikidata: data access
The structured knowledge base behind Wikipedia. SkeleTrace keeps items that are instances of human and whose label matches exactly.
- Companies House developer hub
The UK register of companies and their officers. Requires a free API key.
- GLEIF API
The global index of Legal Entity Identifiers, with legal names, addresses and parent relationships.
- OpenCorporates API
Company records gathered from registers in many jurisdictions. Requires an API token.
- OpenAlex documentation
An open index of scholarly authors, works and institutions.
- ORCID documentation
Persistent identifiers for researchers. SkeleTrace reads public records through the expanded search.
- Open Library APIs
The Internet Archive’s open catalogue of books and their authors.
Search interfaces
Sources whose results are kept as leads: worth reading, never linked.
- Google Programmable Search JSON API
Web search through a configured search engine, for existing API customers.
- Crossref REST API
Metadata for scholarly works, including their author lists. Supplying a contact address is good practice.
- Bluesky developer documentation
Profile search on the AT Protocol network.
- GitHub REST API: search
Account search by full name. A token raises the rate limit.
- CourtListener REST API
The Free Law Project’s archive of US court opinions. Requires an API token.
Domains and web history
- IANA RDAP bootstrap registry
Which registration data service is authoritative for each top-level domain. SkeleTrace uses the longest matching suffix.
- RFC 9083: JSON responses for RDAP
The format of the registration data that RDAP services return.
- RFC 9224: finding the authoritative RDAP service
How the bootstrap registry is meant to be used.
- Wayback CDX server
The Internet Archive’s capture index, used to list archived pages on a domain.
- urlscan.io API
Search across existing public scans of web pages.
Standards and formats
- RFC 8259: JSON
The data interchange format every SkeleTrace command speaks.
- JSON Lines
One JSON value per line: the format of packet event files.
- RFC 7946: GeoJSON
The format of sparse-geo maps.
- RFC 3339: date and time on the internet
The form of every timestamp.
- EPSG:4326, WGS 84
The coordinate reference system for every position.
- GraphML
An XML format for graphs; case notebooks export it.
- PCAP Next Generation capture file format
The pcapng format, read by the landscape.
- PCAP capture file format
The classic pcap format, also read by the landscape.
- SQLite database file format
The format of the case file.
Methods
The research behind the analysis and the drawing.
- Tarjan, R. (1972). Depth-first search and linear graph algorithms.
SIAM Journal on Computing 1(2), 146–160. The basis of chokepoint and bridge detection.
- Hopcroft, J. and Tarjan, R. (1973). Algorithm 447: efficient algorithms for graph manipulation.
Communications of the ACM 16(6), 372–378. Biconnected components in linear time.
- Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication.
Bell System Technical Journal 27(3), 379–423. The entropy behind source diversity and the landscape.
- Kullback, S. and Leibler, R. A. (1951). On information and sufficiency.
Annals of Mathematical Statistics 22(1), 79–86. The divergence behind the landscape’s shift marker.
- Fruchterman, T. M. J. and Reingold, E. M. (1991). Graph drawing by force-directed placement.
Software: Practice and Experience 21(11), 1129–1164. The family of layouts the viewer uses.
- Barnes, J. and Hut, P. (1986). A hierarchical O(N log N) force-calculation algorithm.
Nature 324, 446–449. How the viewer lays out large graphs quickly.
Maxwell’s demon
The physics behind the landscape’s name.
- Szilard, L. (1929). Über die Entropieverminderung in einem thermodynamischen System bei Eingriffen intelligenter Wesen.
Zeitschrift für Physik 53, 840–856. The first account to tie the demon’s sorting to information.
- Landauer, R. (1961). Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process.
IBM Journal of Research and Development 5(3), 183–191.
- Bennett, C. H. (1982). The thermodynamics of computation: a review.
International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21, 905–940. Why the demon cannot win in the end.
Practice and ethics
- Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations
From the UN Human Rights Office and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley: professional standards for collecting and preserving open-source evidence.
- Bellingcat Online Investigation Toolkit
A maintained guide to tools for open-source research.
- Global Investigative Journalism Network
Guides and methods for investigative work.
- General Data Protection Regulation, (EU) 2016/679
The law on processing personal data in the EU. Information that is public is still personal data.
- Information Commissioner’s Office
The UK data protection regulator, with guidance on lawful processing.
Networks and measurement
- RIPE Atlas
A global network of probes that measure internet connectivity.
- PeeringDB
Where networks publish how they interconnect: exchanges, facilities and peering policies.
- Submarine Cable Map
TeleGeography’s map of undersea cables and their landing points.
- CAIDA
The Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis: topology data and research.
- Lookyloo
A web capture tool that maps everything a page loads. SkeleTrace reads its capture summaries and capture trees.
Tools that pair well
- Wireshark
Capture and inspect traffic; its pcapng files open in the landscape.
- Npcap
Packet capture for Windows, needed there for live capture.
- Natural Earth
Public-domain map data; the viewer’s coastlines come from it.
- The Rust programming language
The language SkeleTrace is written in.