Conclusions and lessons learned The SUMMA database responds to the peculiarities of the Interamerican Human Rights System to facilitate the retrieval of case law dictated by the bodies which form it, the Court and the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights. Although the case law of the Interamerican System makes the most part of this system, the human rights framework includes similar mechanisms around the world, so many of the features of this database can be extrapolated to other contexts. In general, when doing the legal tracking of a case, it is effective to aggregate the full procedure under the same “umbrella” element, as this database does with the case element. This way, it is possible to record several types of case law, each with its peculiarities, and gather them within a case. Also, the chronological visualization helps to have a clear picture of the whole process and makes a good method to link all the relevant information about a case. When describing different types of case law, the options to retrieve relevant documents are greatly increased by the inclusion of normalized descriptive terms. Regarding this point, the database includes a broad list of terms helping to describe cases, as well as other typologies for resolutions and judgements. Both indexes constitute good solutions to improve retrieval opportunities. In the same line, listing the articles of international mechanisms to reference the rights that have (or don’t have) been violated according to sentences and merit reports add valuable access points to find cases and quickly visualize the rights at stake in each case. Finally, as we always like to highlight, when developing and implementing an information system every institution needs to adapt the information structure and the descriptive terms to meet its needs. 13