Micro-Thesauri FAQ

What are Micro-Thesauri, and why do we use Micro-Thesauri?

HURIDOCS Micro-thesauri are part of an effort to provide tools for human rights documentation. They are intended to provide controlled vocabularies for the Events Standard Formats as well as for other manual or computerized systems of documenting human rights violations. OpenEvSys comes preloaded with 68 Micro-thesauri.

Can we add other Thesauri?

Yes and no. You cannot add completely new microthesauri. However, there are two options available to you:

• You can completely delete and modify any of the current microthesauri in the system: For example, there is a microthesaurus called "Occupations", which is a big hierarchical list of jobs, which displays in the "Occupations" field in the Person form. Let's say you don't need this field or the thesaurus, but did need one for "Political Affiliation". You could rename "occupation" as "political affiliaton"; then, delete all the current terms from the "occupation" microthesaurus, and build your own list of political parties.
• Make use of the fields and microthesauri set aside for local microthesauri: these include "Local Geographical Area", "Local Index" and "Local terms for occupation". You could equally rename them to anything, purge the current microthesauri terms and add your own.
  

Can we edit the Micro Thesauri?

Yes, you may edit any Micro Thesauri that you wish by selecting it from the list of Thesauri, which can be accessed via the Micro Thesauri part of the Admin section.

Can we export and import new Micro-Thesauri

Yes, but it's not easy to do and requires some scripting skills and knowledge of MySQL. We are working on making this simpler.