Conceptual data modeling: entities, properties and relationships Conceptually speaking, the data model is a structured view of your data founded on entities, properties (or attributes) and relationships. Entities are objects described in the database by means of properties. An entity could be a person, an object, a document or any item we want to record data about. In the human rights field, we normally describe victims, HR violation events, laws, acts, courts, etc. This notion is similar to the idea of unit of analysis in social research methodology. Properties are descriptive attributes that are assigned to entities. There are various types of properties, such as text, numeric, select one from a list, select multiple from a list, date, time, etc. For instance, a victim (entity) is described through a name (text), an age (number), a date of birth (date), etc. This notion is familiar and could be articulated to the concept of variable, in statistics. Relationships allow entities to be connected to each other. They define how entities interact. For example, one act can have various victims, one perpetrator can be involved in various acts, etc. Relationships are very important in the data model since they bring the data structure “to life”. By this expression we mean: to support dynamic escenarios and flows, avoid or reduce data duplication, to circunscribe certain properties to a specific context (since out of that context certain data could generate confusions or mistakes). In the next section, we provide simple visualizations of data models, based in real cases. Since the data model could get as complex as the image below, we decided to illustrate them in a more pedagogical way, if easier we could think of these approximations as standard formats. 7