Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
man rights event as a single act committed against
a single victim, the organization has already ruled
out any analysis of repression directed against
villages, trade unions, and other groups. To under-
stand targeted government action, attacks against
individual victims should therefore be maintained
in such a way that they can be viewed as a single
mass event.
Another important aspect of human rights mon-
itoring by NGOs is the use of standard formats and
controlled vocabularies (Guzman & Verstappen,
2003). A Geneva-based NGO called HURIDOCS
(Human Rights Information and Documentation
Services, International, http://www.huridocs.org)
has produced standard formats for recording hu-
man rights events and exchanging information
with others in the human rights regime (Dueck,
Guzman, & Verstappen, 2001a). Organizations are
encouraged to use these when documenting human
rights abuse, firstly to describe what happened and
who did what to whom, and secondly to provide
an account of the actions taken in response. The
first part is based on documenting events and
acts (an event is something that happens, and it
is made up of a single act or a series of related
acts such as an attack on a labour leader and the
bombing of his office), the people involved and
the nature of their involvement. The individuals
or groups involved in an event may be victims
(the object of an act) or perpetrators (the ones
who commits the act).
The second part of the methodology outlined
by Dueck, Guzman & Verstappen (2001a) is to
describe the actions taken in response to an event
and who did them. It covers the provision of in-
formation (including an examination of conflict-
ing reports and assessment of the information's
reliability), any intervention relating to the event
(assistance provided, medical examination, etc.),
details of the person providing the information,
and details of any intervening parties.
HURIDOCS have also developed micro-
thesauri to enhance the effectiveness of ICT-based
applications that use the event standard formats.
This helps with data classification, and gives us-
ers coherence and consistency in their data entry
(Dueck, Guzman, & Verstappen, 2001b). This
contains a HURIDOCS Index Terms list which
includes all the terms commonly used in human
rights work. It also contains coded typologies
for types of act (deliberate killing, harassment,
violation of the right to privacy, etc), the rights
that apply to an event, the physical identification
markings on the victim or perpetrator, and the
source providing the information.
The use of standards and codes make it easier to
record and retrieve information relating to human
rights events, especially in cases where computer-
based systems are used to store the information.
It is also easier to exchange or communicate
information to other organizations if they use the
same standards and codes. So while it is com-
monplace for recordings made by witnesses and
others in the field to use free form descriptions of
an event, the information becomes more valuable
if it is encoded using standard formats.
Human rights organizations are also encour-
aged to use metadata - which is data describ-
ing the content, structure and management of
information - to describe their published online
information, as this makes it easier for search
engines to sort and retrieve it. The most widely
used standard for this is Dublin Core (http://
dublincore.org/). It is a vocabulary of fifteen
elements used in information resource descrip-
tions, the semantics of which have been estab-
lished through consensus by an international,
cross-disciplinary group of professionals from
librarianship, computer science, text encoding,
the museum community, and other related fields
of scholarship. The elements include resource
properties such as creator, date, description,
format, language and publisher.
The use of metadata can be supplemented by
use of the HURIDOCS micro-thesauri to describe
the content of a record or web page in a human
rights context. A good example of how this can
benefit human rights workers is HuriSearch
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