What is a source?

An organization typically collects the details of human rights violations from a variety of sources. A source may be a single document, such as an interview transcript or medical report, or it may be a group of documents, such as cases file or a collection of related newspaper articles. Because these sources can often describe the same acts involving the same victim and/or perpetrator, it is vital that duplicates are recorded, but more than one not counted when calculating the magnitude of the abuse. Alternatively, subsequent investigation may reveal that some of the sources are false, so the associated violations must also be excluded from any statistical analysis.

What is judgment?

The procedure for eliminating duplicates and false sources is known as judgment, and is achieved in the database by separating the source and judgment layers. The judgment layer is derived from the source layer and is the statistically correct, duplicate-free version of the data.

What is the process for creating a judgment?

The judgment process first involves identifying that an actor described by one source is the same as that described in another source. Having identified an actor, the associated violations can then be matched and merged. Several analysts, each provided with a copy of the same data, can simultaneously judge the sources. The comparison of the different copies is then used to measure the consistency of the matching criteria and identify areas where the criteria are vague. Matches are constantly reviewed to verify that the criteia used to make the matches is based on sound judgment and logical reasoning. Sometimes matches are undone when they are deemed to be incorrect. The result is a complete judgment layer which can be traced back to the source layer.

The separate storage of source and judgment layers is unique to the Analyzer application. It ensures that the system produces accurate results while also maintaining a complete record, or audit trail, of the human rights cases received by an organization. The source and judgment layers together can be used to calculate statistics, while the judgment layer is the basis for multiple systems estimation.

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.