● Judges with more separate votes emitted. ● Judgements related to reparations (typology) dictated between 2005 and 2012 (date range). The number of queries is infinite considering every possible combination between filters, but queries by descriptive term or by affected rights are the most frequent. Also, there is a group of preset queries that can be visualized with graphics from the sections of the top menu: ● Cases and provisory measures by country. ● Frequent descriptive terms in cases. ● Composition of the Court and the Commission by sex and country. Descriptors: how to facilitate the retrieval of information about decisions made by the Court and the Commission? Improving information access means facilitating relevant information retrieval in the shortest time possible. To do so, information needs to be properly structured and described, with terms providing knowledge about documents’ meaning and context, the same ones that will lead users’ searches. Including descriptive terms (called descriptors) allows to find documents throughout various search paths. For example, in the SUMMA database documents can be retrieved by typology, involved countries, signatory judges or topics covered by documents. Making these descriptive terms effective demands the creation of a closed index so people in charge of populating the database can choose within them. Normalization (the process of defining a set of possible values so there is no confusion between terms) helps to avoid problems related to human language. Think, for instance, about recording a new case opened in Guatemala. If the person who records the case chooses the official name of the State, “Republic of Guatemala”, the case won’t be retrieved when looking for cases in “Guatemala”. In this manner, normalized descriptors serve to avoid these inconsistencies. The country example is very simple, but there are other lists of variables that are not that evident. In the SUMMA database, the most complex index is the one used to describe 6

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