Designing an Ontology for Human Rights Violations Documentation Through Practitioner Input and Information Infrastructure Theory

Abstract

Human rights groups of varying sizes collect information about human rights violations. Managing this information in a structured way is a challenging task, particularly since many human rights groups have limited budgets. This paper presents the initial work with requirements elicitation leading to the design of OntoRights - a domain ontology for human rights violations documentation that aims at helping human rights organisations to structure their documentation. To ensure that the ontology was grounded in practice, two interconnected surveys of manuals and practitioners were conducted. Moreover, the design used information infrastructure theory to increase the ontology’s potential uptake. The resulting ontology extends the legal core ontology UFO-L and is represented in OntoUML. As a demonstration, it was instantiated twice: in a fictitious and in a real case.