Technical writing

Building the Cross-Agency Regulatory Entity Graph: 50M+ Records, One Join

May 1, 2026· 11 min read· AI Analytics

Regulatory dataEntity resolutionCloudflare D1MCP

The Federal Regulatory Data Hub combines datasets from many agencies. Getting any single source into a queryable API is straightforward. The hard part is answering the question that compliance teams, journalists, and researchers actually ask: what is every regulatory event for this company, across all agencies, sorted by date?

Boeing has NTSB aviation accidents, FAA airworthiness directives, SEC 8-K filings, DOJ settlement agreements, OSHA violations, and OFAC screening entries — all under different identifiers in different databases. ExxonMobil has 30+ EPA enforcement cases, SEC EDGAR filings, OFAC exposure through subsidiaries, and IRS nonprofit-adjacent entities. Getting any of those in isolation is easy. Joining them in a single query is the problem this post describes solving.

The identifier problem

Federal datasets use different identifiers for the same entity:

CIK — SEC Central Index Key (EDGAR)
ticker — exchange symbol (SEC, CFTC, FINRA)
UEI — Unique Entity Identifier (SAM.gov, USAspending)
LEI — Legal Entity Identifier (CFTC, FinCEN)
DUNS — legacy D-U-N-S Number (contracts, grants)
NPI — National Provider Identifier (CMS, HHS)
EIN — IRS Employer Identification Number (IRS, DOL)
free-text name — OFAC, EPA enforcement, CFPB, DOJ press

A company can appear in each of these ID spaces under different forms of its name and with no shared identifier across datasets. Pfizer's CIK in EDGAR, its UEI in USAspending, and its NPI as a healthcare manufacturer are three different numbers with no foreign-key relationship in any government database.

The entity_master table

The entity bridge is a single SQLite table on Cloudflare D1:

CREATE TABLE entity_master (
  id           INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
  canonical    TEXT NOT NULL,   -- e.g. "Pfizer Inc."
  slug         TEXT UNIQUE,     -- e.g. "PFE"
  cik          TEXT,            -- SEC EDGAR
  ticker       TEXT,
  uei          TEXT,            -- SAM.gov / USAspending
  lei          TEXT,            -- CFTC / FinCEN
  duns         TEXT,            -- legacy
  npi          TEXT,            -- CMS
  ein          TEXT,            -- IRS
  aliases      TEXT,            -- JSON array of known name variants
  updated_at   TEXT
);

CREATE INDEX em_cik     ON entity_master(cik);
CREATE INDEX em_ticker  ON entity_master(ticker);
CREATE INDEX em_uei     ON entity_master(uei);
CREATE INDEX em_lei     ON entity_master(lei);
CREATE INDEX em_npi     ON entity_master(npi);

Each row maps a single real-world entity to every identifier we can confirm for it. Thealiases column is a JSON array of every name variant we've seen across datasets — “Pfizer Inc.”, “PFIZER INC”, “Pfizer Pharmaceuticals”, “Pfizer Inc (NY)” — used for fuzzy matching on datasets that don't carry a structured identifier.

Building the mapping: three passes

Pass 1 — seed from EDGAR + SAM.gov

SEC EDGAR's company index carries CIK → ticker → name for ~10k public companies. SAM.gov's entity registration carries UEI → EIN → CAGE → name for every federal contractor and grantee. These two seed the entity_master with structured ID pairs for the highest-coverage entities: public companies and federal vendors.

# Seed: EDGAR company.idx → entity_master
for company in edgar_companies:
    upsert entity_master(
        cik=company.cik,
        ticker=company.ticker,
        canonical=company.name,
        aliases=[company.name, company.former_names...]
    )

# Augment: SAM.gov registration → match on EIN
for vendor in sam_entities:
    match = find_by_ein(vendor.ein)
    if match:
        update entity_master(uei=vendor.uei) where id=match.id
    else:
        insert entity_master(uei=vendor.uei, canonical=vendor.name, ...)

Pass 2 — LEI bridge via GLEIF

GLEIF (Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation) publishes a public mapping of LEI → legal name → registered country. For entities in our master that have an EIN or CIK, we fuzzy-match against the GLEIF corpus to acquire the LEI. LEI unlocks CFTC COT data, FinCEN FBAR enforcement, and cross-border screening list entries.

Pass 3 — name normalization for free-text datasets

Datasets like OFAC, EPA enforcement, CFPB, and DOJ press releases don't carry structured identifiers. An EPA enforcement case lists “ExxonMobil Pipeline Company, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil Corporation”. The matching problem is entity disambiguation at scale.

We run a two-stage match: (1) exact normalized-name match against the aliasesarray, (2) token-sorted cosine similarity against the canonical name using TF-IDF vectors built over the entity_master corpus. Matches below 0.85 similarity go to a review queue rather than automatic linkage.

The cross-agency query

Once entity_master is populated, a cross-agency query is just a parameterized lookup:

# Resolve input to entity_master.id
entity = resolve("ExxonMobil")   # ticker, CIK, UEI, or name

# Fan out to every dataset
events = []
events += query(sec_filings,          entity.cik)
events += query(sec_8k,               entity.cik)
events += query(epa_enforcement,      entity.slug, fuzzy=True)
events += query(ofac_recent,          entity.aliases)
events += query(doj_press,            entity.aliases)
events += query(cfpb_enforcement,     entity.slug)
events += query(msha_violations,      entity.slug)
events += query(usaspending_contracts, entity.uei)

# Sort by date, return unified timeline
return sorted(events, key=lambda e: e.date, reverse=True)

In practice the implementation fans supported lookups across D1 and merges the results server-side. Response time and coverage depend on the identifiers and source routes available for the requested entity.

The entity endpoint

The current public example is:

curl https://api.ai-analytics.org/entity/XOM

The response includes a unified timeline of the supported regulatory events found for that entity, with dataset attribution and source links where the underlying record provides them. Dataset coverage is not a claim that every possible agency event is present.

What breaks

A few categories of entity are hard to resolve well:

Subsidiaries. OFAC often designates a subsidiary, not the parent. EPA enforcement cases frequently name the operating entity rather than the publicly-traded parent. We maintain a subsidiary→parent mapping for ~3k major corporate hierarchies but coverage is incomplete.
Name collisions. “National Energy Corporation” exists in 40+ states. Without a disambiguating identifier, cross-dataset joins produce false positives. We flag low-confidence matches in the response.
Individuals. OFAC designates individuals. HHS-OIG excludes individual providers (by NPI). SEC enforcement actions name executives. The entity bridge currently treats individuals and organizations in the same table — this works but creates some noise in common-name disambiguation.
Government entities. City of Los Angeles, LAUSD, and various public hospitals appear in SAM.gov (as grantees), CMS (as providers), and HHS-OIG (as excluded entities). Their UEIs resolve correctly; their NPI→UEI bridge is incomplete.

What this enables

The cross-agency join is what separates a dataset catalog from a regulatory intelligence platform. With sufficient source coverage, it can support questions such as:

Every regulatory event for a company in a due-diligence workflow, without manually querying SEC, EPA, DOJ, and OFAC separately.
Risk scoring: is this vendor on any of the 30+ screening lists, and how recently were its enforcement cases resolved?
M&A diligence: what regulatory tail does the acquisition target carry across agencies?
Investigative journalism: who in the OFAC SDN list also appears in the FDIC enforcement database, and what are the dollar amounts?

The verified entity example is queryable directly at api.ai-analytics.org/entity/XOM and via the MCP server (73 tools). Routes not shown here should be discovered from the current API catalog rather than inferred from historical article examples.

Previous in this series: Building the Federal Regulatory Data Hub on Cloudflare D1: 50M+ records at the edge →

For how the entity identifiers in this bridge are normalized across CIK, UEI, LEI, DUNS, and NPI: Entity ID normalization in the Federal Regulatory Data Hub →

For how the entity bridge resolves entity names when no shared identifier exists — alias explosion, Jaro-Winkler and TF-IDF fuzzy matching, and sanctions evasion detection: Name matching in federal regulatory data: aliases, subsidiaries, and sanctions evasion →

Next in this series: Compliance screening across 30+ federal enforcement lists: how the risk score works →

For near-real-time OFAC sanctions, SAM debarment, and enforcement action webhooks delivered via the entity bridge: Federal Regulatory Data Hub change alerts →

For the entity subscription layer built on top of this bridge — EntitySubscription model, cross-list fan-out, severity scoring, and portfolio-level change monitoring: Entity subscriptions in the Federal Regulatory Data Hub: per-entity change monitoring across 30+ enforcement lists →

For how stable canonical IDs are generated and maintained across supported datasets — SHA-256 ID generation, merge/split events, and subscriber continuity guarantees: Canonical entity IDs in the Federal Regulatory Data Hub: stable identifiers across supported datasets →