The Popolo data standard developed by an alliance of open data activists is the foundation of followthemoney. It provides the origin of key entities, including Person, Organization and Membership.
Popolo was then implemented by EveryPolitician.org, a MySociety project, establishing a practical reference.
This was extended into OCCRP Schema, a JSONSchema based entity model. The JSONSchema definitions were eventually superseded by a custom schema definition format to form FollowTheMoney.
The evolution of FollowTheMoney (FtM) data model was driven by a grant of the Google Digital News Initiative issued in 2016 for the development of the Aleph platform.
Dr. Amy Guy took an essential role in breaking followthemoney out of Aleph and introducing the current entity-based model.