ACT
_Act_ is a RULE-TYPE about occurrences at a point in time. In an _act_, a SUBJECT does something to an OBJECT. What the SUBJECT does is called the VERB. There are also other LINKs which qualify the connection, such as an EVENT, a date, and a location. [see entry in Chapter 2]

ATTRIBUTE
An _attribute_ is a characteristic or property of an ENTITY. In relational database terminology an _attribute_ usually means a column or FIELD in a table, although an _attribute_ may be represented by one or more records in a second TABLE which is subordinate and linked to the first.

BIO
_Biography_ is a RULE-TYPE about a status held by a person or an organization from one point in time until a later point in time. The status (e.g., membership in an organization, a political office, detention) is qualified by the situation (name of the organization, title of office, 'detained') and the level of the status holder in the situation (rank in the organization, political level, 'prisoner'). [see entry in Chapter 2]

CATEGORY
Every TERM in the VOCAB table belongs to a _category_, or group, of items which the VOCAB designers believe are somehow related. A TERM may point to a sub-category of other TERMs which belong to it. Note that the numeric codes on the left are an adaption from the HURIDOCS List of Geographical Terms and codes (Dueck and Noval et al., 1993b).

      HURIDOCS
      codes           country list
     
      0000            Countries:
      6322            Canada
      6322.0           |---Provinces of Canada: 
      6322.1               Manitoba
      6322.2               Ontario
      6357            USA
      6357.0           |---States of the US: 
      6357.1               Texas
      6357.2               Pennsylvania
      6357.2.0              |---Counties of Pennsylvania: 
      6357.2.1                  Allegheny
      6357.3               Florida
      6357.4               Michigan
      6357.4.0              |---Counties of Michigan: 
      6357.4.1                  Washtenaw
      6357.4.2                  Wayne
      6231            El Salvador
      6231.0           |---Departamentos of El Salvador: 
      6231.1               Chalatenango
      6231.2               Usulutan
      6231.3               San Salvador
      6231.3.0              |---Municipios of San Salvador: 
      6231.3.1                  Mejicanos
      6231.3.1.0                 |---cantones of Mejicanos: 
      6231.3.1.1                     Zacamil
      6231.4               San Vicente
      6231.4.0              |---Municipios of San Vicente: 
      6231.4.1                  Tecoluca

In this example, the _category_ "countries" includes the TERMs "Canada," "USA," and "El Salvador". The TERM "El Salvador" contains the _category_ "departamentos of El Salvador." This category includes "Chaletenango," "San Salvador," and "San Vicente." "San Salvador" contains the sub-category "municipios of San Salvador," which includes only "Mejicanos." But "Mejicanos" contains "cantones of Mejicanos", which itself includes "Zacamil."

DIARY
The TABLE that contains information relating to an entire RULE- INSTANCE, such as notes or other descriptive information. The diary can be regarded as the header table to the LINK table. A diary item has an INSTANCE-ID in common with its constituent records contained in the LINK table. For example the diary item could record that it is an instance of the Act-of-violence RULE. The DIARY record would also contain the date and a notes field. [see entry in Chapter 2]

DESCRIPTOR
Any TERM plus the TERM's position in a CATEGORY from the list in VOCAB. Thus a _descriptor_ refers not only to the words of the TERM, but also to the meaning of the TERM placed in a sequence of CATEGORIES and sub-CATEGORIES. The same TERM might appear in different CATEGORIES and therefore mean quite different ideas. The term "beating" might appear in the CATEGORY "Torture in custody" and also in the CATEGORY "Domestic Violence" -- the TERM would have quite different meanings (e.g., implications for agency intervention) depending on its CATEGORY.

ENTITY
An entity is any distinguishable object or concept that is to be represented in the database. Entities are represented by a unique identifying code (the KEY) stored as a single record in a table, called the entity's master record. Note that although an entity has only one master record, it may have many other records associated with it. For example, each person is represented in the database by one record in the NAME table. Information about that person's membership in organizations, however, may be represented by one or more RULE-INSTANCES (i.e., DIARY records + LINK records) of the BIOGRAPHY RULE-TYPE. [see entry in Chapter 2]

EVENT
An _event_ is the organizing context for one or many Acts-of-violence, or other sorts of RULE-INSTANCES, or other EVENTs. An EVENT may be large or small, for example: a coup (all the arrests, killings, etc., associated with the coup), a land takeover (eviction, abuses of authority), a demonstration (with abuses of authority, arrests and what happened to the arrested people while in custody), a raid on an office (arrests, theft or destruction of goods or real property), or the succession of occurrences which begins with a single person's arrest (illegal detention, different kinds of torture, and an illegal execution). Note that the EVENT is a conceptual construction of the agency maintaining the database. (_event_ is sometimes called case or context) See also SCOPE [see entry in Chapter 2]

FIELD
A _fields_ or columns in a TABLE contain information associated with the records of that table. For example, in the NAME entity table, there might be fields for surname, given_name, and date_of_birth. Each field contains data of a single type: the surname, for example, is a string of characters; date_of_birth is a date, height is a number (165, meaning 165 cm), etc.

FIELDNAME
A _fieldname_ describes the ROLE a DESCRIPTOR plays with regard to an ENTITY to which it is connected. A syllogism might be that fieldname is to descriptor what role is to entity.

INSTANCE-ID
In each RULE-INSTANCE, the DIARY record and all the associated records in LINK are related by having the same _instance-id_. This KEY might also be called diary_id.

INTERVENTION
(Abbreviation: INTVN) any action taken on behalf of a victim of a human rights violation. The intervention may be performed by friends or family of the victim, or by a domestic or international human rights organization, or by the victim him- or herself. Note that like an EVENT, an intervention could have multiple RULE-INSTANCEs associated with it. For example, if an agency conducted a search for a disappeared person, that search might include many letters written, many visits made, or many paid advertisements placed in newspapers. [see entry in Chapter 2]

KEY
The _key_ is a code which uniquely identifies each master record in the database. In the second sample table design, the keys are name_id (NAME), intvn_id (INTERVENTION), event_id (EVENT), vocab_id (VOCAB) and diary_id (DIARY).

LINK
A LINK records that an ENTITY is part of a RULE-INSTANCE. For example in an instance of an Act-of-violence, there will exist one link to record the victim (OBJECT), a second to record the perpetrator (SUBJECT), a third to record the EVENT (context), etc., according to the RULE. Typically, a link will contain the INSTANCE-ID (which connects it to the information in its DIARY item), the TABLE storing the ENTITY (eg 'Name'), its ID (the Name-Id), and this link's ROLE (eg. 'Victim').

NAME
Name is a TABLE that stores information on ENTITIES that are individuals or organisations. [see entry in Chapter 2]

NORMALIZATION
Normalization is the process of designing database tables to ensure that the fields in each table do not repeat, are fully identified by a unique KEY, and are not dependent on any non-key ATTRIBUTEs.

OBJECT
Used in the grammatical sense. _Object_ ROLES include accused, victim.

RELATIONSHIP
_Relationship_ is a RULE-TYPE which connects ENTITIES of similar type in a qualified relationship. For example, two children of the same parents (or of one common parent) are "siblings," connection which would be represented by a RULE-INSTANCE of the Family-Relationship RULE (itself of the _relationship_ RULE-TYPE) between two NAME ENTITIES, and qualified by a DESCRIPTOR from the "Family Relations" CATEGORY; in this case the DESCRIPTOR TERM would be "siblings." [see entry in Chapter 2]

ROLE
Within a RULE, the ROLE defines the position and significance of an ENTITY, as this may not be apparent. Thus if there is more than one person defined in a RULE the ROLE will indicate which is a source, victim, witness etc. The ROLE is for RULEs as FIELDs are for TABLEs. See also OBJECT, SUBJECT

RULE
Each _rule_ of the data-model describes a relationship between ENTITIES, the possible ROLES that these ENTITIES can play vis-a-vis each other, the possible DESCRIPTORS that mediate the relationships between entities, and how the relationship occurs in time (TIME-STRUCTURE). Thus the 'Act-of-violence' RULE specifies a perpetrator ROLE, a victim ROLE, a CONTEXT ROLE, and allows a VERB (such as 'arrest', 'torture', 'beating', etc., which describes what the SUBJECT did to the OBJECT); all of which happened at a single point in time.

RULE-STRUCTURE
The ENTITIES, ROLES, TIME-STRUCTURE, etc., defined in a RULE.

RULE-TYPE
RULES can be grouped into types that share a similar RULE-STRUCTURE. That is, RULES of the same RULE-TYPE connect similar ENTITIES in similar ways with similar TIME-STRUCTURES. ACT, BIOGRAPHY, and RELATION are the RULE-TYPEs defined in this paper.

SCOPE
The SCOPE of an EVENT describes the incidents that are seen as happening in the CONTEXT of the EVENT such as the arrests following a demonstration. The _scope_ of an EVENT defines how widely in space, time, or relevance (e.g., related victims) a single EVENT may be construed. Note that a single RULE-INSTANCE may be seen at one time as part of the scope of one EVENT but later might be considered in the scope of another EVENT. _Scope_ defines the bounds of an EVENT.

SUBJECT
Used in the gramatical sense of the performer of an ACT rather than in the sense of a person subjected to abuse. Subject ROLES include perpetrator, witness.

TABLE
A _table_ is a group of records, each of which is composed of FIELDS common to all the records in the _table_. In an ENTITY table, each record connects a unique _key_ to some defined set of ATTRIBUTES. Each of the ENTITIES is represented by a single master _table_, although other tables might also contain information about some ENTITY. Other tables (e.g., LINK) do not have unique KEYS for each record because LINK records connect keys together (i.e., ENTITY and DESCRIPTOR keys to DIARY keys).

TERM
The word or words which are the value of a DESCRIPTOR. The range of _terms_ describes the universe of the CATEGORY in the VOCAB list. For example, if the CATEGORY is "occupation," the terms might include "doctor," "farmer," and "elephant trainer," depending on the needs of the agency. Note that in the VOCAB TABLE, an agency might maintain multiple TERM FIELDs, each one of which contains words which mean the same or very similar ideas in different languages.

TIME-STRUCTURE
How a RULE exists in time. For example, ACTs occur at a single point in time, whereas BIOgraphy information defines a status held from a certain time until some later time, as do RELaTioNs.

VERB
The single _verb_ in a complete RULE-INSTANCE of RULE-TYPE ACT describes the relationship between its SUBJECT and its OBJECT. The range of possible verbs depends on the specific RULE. For example, an instance of the act-of-violence RULE could contain such verbs as 'arrest','torture','kill,' none of which would be applicable to an instance of the facts-of-the-case RULE.

VOCAB The Vocab TABLE stores DESCRIPTORS, TERMS and their CATEGORY structure. [see entry in Chapter 2]

Helpful syllogisms:

ROLE:RULE :: FIELD:TABLE

RECORD:ENTITY-TABLE :: RULE-INSTANCE:LINK