What is the human rights data model?

The human rights data model is a structure used to represent a single deposition of human rights.

How is the human rights data model structured?

The human rights data model has three main components: victim, violation, and perpetrator.

A complainant, interviewee, or deponent gives information to a human rights organization about a human rights event. The violent events may have happened only to the complainant or to other people. Each person against whom one or more of the abuses were committed is a victim.

The abuses may have occurred at one time or several different times and at one place or several different places. Additionally, the abuses may have occurred in the same time and place as abuses happening to other victims, or this victim may have been the only victim during some or all of the events. Each violent thing happening to a single victim is called an act or violation.

Zero, one, or many identifiable perpetrators may have committed each act. The perpetrators may be identifiable as individuals or organizations and may have committed one or several acts in the complainant’s narrative. Each victim may have suffered at the hands of the identifiable perpetrator(s) and each perpetrator may have committed violence against one or several victims.

What are the benefits of a human rights data model?

The human rights data model is important as human rights violation data is extremely complex and trying to simplify this model can lead to distortions, which can bias the analysis. As a project collects interviews, many deponents may describe some of the same victims, violations, and perpetrators. The wrong way to handle this problem is to delete the "redundant" or "duplicate" information. The overlapping information contains extremely valuable statistical information that can be used for multiple systems estimation.

Instead of deleting the overlapping information, the overlaps must be identified, and the organization doing the work must make judgments about what is truly unique and what interviews describe the same events and violations. This process is called creating a "judgment layer" on top of many sources, and it is described in more detail in Source and Judgment.

Controlled vocabulary

Human rights data model

Multiple systems estimation

Source and judgment

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The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) applies information technology solutions and statistical techniques to help human rights advocates build evidence-based arguments.