A sample relational schema, in plain English

Every human rights story goes like this: I am a deponent, and I'm here to tell you about things that happened to one or many victims. I myself may or may not be one of those victims. Each of those victims may have suffered one or more violations, and those violations may or may not be what historians call colligated at one or more points in time or space. Each of the violations may have been perpetrated by zero, one, or many identifiable perpetrators, and those perpetrators may be individuals with names and ranks, or they may be institutions. Each of those may be associated with one or more of the violations in this story. That's the complexity of one story. Now we're going to collect 10,000 stories. (Patrick Ball "has spent 12 years designing software that turns information on human rights abuses into databases." Interviewed in New Scientist)

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