Patrick Ball: Human Rights Through Databases

wendyg writes "Thought some folks here might be interested in this interview with Patrick Ball, in which he talks about the work he's doing coding human rights violations into databases that can then be used for data mining to bring the perpetrators to book." This story from last October ("Why Human Rights Requires Free Software") mentions Ball's work in this area; this interview adds a broader look at what he's doing and why.

Comments

"coding"

[hackwrench]

So how is teaching databases to commit human rights violations a good thing?

Wish I could hear the whole story on this

[Radical Rad]

While I was there, I had several quite heated exchanges with different people from the tribunal - we disagreed about the relative importance of truth and justice. I argued that it was important that the world, and especially people in Kosovo, should know what really happened during the war and try the people accused of having committed or ordered violations of human rights. But truth should be first. The tribunal's field people saw things differently so I did my work independently.

I wonder what they were asking him to do for him to have to say that Truth comes before Justice.

Re:This is "Onn---Topic?" How?

[wendyg]

YOu can get more details on how he does his work from his pages at shr.aaas.org (I think it is), which have a number of papers and explanations of how they construct the data model.

wg