HURIDOCS

The Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems, International (HURIDOCS), established in 1982, is a global network of organisations concerned with human rights. HURIDOCS itself does not collect information; rather, it aims to improve information handling capacities of organisations in developing countries, and functions as a decentralised network in which organisations can handle and exchange information according to their own requirements.

HURIDOCS aims to facilitate human rights documentation work by developing tools and techniques for human rights monitoring and information handling (such as formats for the recording and exchange of information on documents and on human rights violations). The various HURIDOCS tools can be consulted and downloaded from its website. The group organises training courses and workshops on human rights information handling, in co-operation with organisations involved in the network. It also provides advice and support on the establishment and maintenance of documentation centres and information systems.

HURIDOCS is an open-ended network where organisations can participate in various ways including task forces and training courses. There is no formal membership structure, but the group has contacts with organisations in more than 150 countries.

HuriSearch, developed by Huridocs, is a specialised human rights search engine which access to complete contents of websites of human rights organisations. As of September 2007, HuriSearch searched the content of over 3,250 sites, with a total of more than 3.8 million pages. It is designed to focus searches on information published in a particular country, by a particular type of organisation, by a specific organisation, or in a specific language. HuriSearch also analyses search results; for each document crawled, relevant keywords out of a list of over 300 terms relevant to human rights are identified.

The website and the search interface are available in eight languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic Chinese and Korean, and allow searching information in 77 languages.

HuriSearch was launched in 2003, and major upgrades became available during the second half of 2006. A new version of HuriSearch was officially launched on 1 December 2006. Since the launch, the site had about 180 unique visitors per day.

HuriSearch is developed by HURIDOCS in collaboration with FAST, a search technology company. In 2009, HuriSearch was re-developed as an Open Search search engine, in collaboration with wiizio.com.

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