Entities must be distinguished from the roles that those entities might play in any concrete act that the database is tracking. For example, in a human rights database, people are entities. Terms, including perpetrator, victims, witness, and lawyer, do not define entities but roles that persons play in particular acts. More generally, the same person might act many roles. This logic means that the concept to be represented as an entity is the person rather than the role the person might be playing in a particular situation. In many human rights information systems, database designers have defined tables to represent particular roles. This kind of representation makes sense in a paper system because different kinds of information are collected for perpetrators and victims, for example, even though both are usually people. However, the difference between a perpetrator and a witness, in database terms, is the different roles they play in particular acts. The task force suggests that these roles be implemented in links between entities, and not by having different tables for different roles.

A rule defines the association between the basic data entities which a HURIDOCS compatible database may need to support. For example if a human rights "act of violence" is to be recorded, a victim, a perpetrator, a date, an event type and a location should be expected. Any one of these items may be unknown, but they are all expected for a complete record. Including "acts," we identified three fundamental types of rule, outlined below.

Structural rules define how tables connect together. Tables link by "one to many" (in shorthand, 1:m) and "many to many" (m:m) techniques to which are attached substantive meaning. The RULEs presented in Section 6 are of this type.

Scope rules define hierarchic relations, for example between events and acts, or between large, abstract events, and smaller events.

Sequence rules define how to represent sequences of related entities, for example an arrest followed by a trial, sentencing, imprisonment, appeal etc.

We developed three types of structural rule: act, biography, and relationship. The definitions are presented in Section 6.

The scope rules we agreed on was only the rudimentary recognition that EVENTs are the conceptual creations of human rights agencies used to order the vast array of acts which compose a human rights violation. Thus EVENTs are composed of acts. Also, we agreed that some events may be very large, and thereby encompass smaller events. For example, imagine event such as the story of the kidnapping and murder of three men from a family ("Disappearance of the Pueblo brothers"). This event might be composed of a large number of specific acts (the kidnappings, acts of torture, the killings, exhumations, etc.). However, the agency recording this event might classify it as part of a trend they are tracking, say "The scorched-earth campaign of Col. Alvarez." The campaign would be an event which would be associated with the various smaller, more specific events such as the Pueblo brothers kidnappings.

Sequence rules must still be developed.