Index cards pinned to a cork board, joined by thread. Three cards name cases, El Mozote, Caracazo and El Amparo, and most threads run through one card in the middle, Corte IDH. The print is in black and a green ink.

Uwazi for research and OSINT I

A case is a hub of documents

What connects them

Uwazi’s Library turned into a research and OSINT tool.

Juan M. Cornejo

Uwazi for research and OSINT I

A notebook

This notebook covers two parts of the Uwazi research tools on CEJIL’s public database: how a case holds its documents, and what connects two cases.

Notes2
A case, sketched3
A case is a hub of documents4
One case, its links5
How a case holds its documents6
A case in the prototype7
Its links, grouped8
What connects two cases9
Three pairs of cases, measured10
Try it11
Two routes between two cases12
Connect to, in the prototype13
The path, drawn14
Where the numbers come from15
In short16

1Uwazi for research and OSINT I

Notes

SUMMA is CEJIL’s public Uwazi database of the cases heard by the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights.
Both bodies decide the same cases. Before SUMMA, their decisions were kept in two separate databases.
In Uwazi, a record’s template sets its fields. A relationship is a typed link between two records.
In SUMMA the case is the core record: every document of a procedure links to its case.
A case can inherit a value from a record it links to, such as a place’s coordinates.
A path is a chain of links from one record to another, and a hop is one link in it.
A hub is a record linked to hundreds of others, such as the Court or a country.
I designed “Connect to…” in a research prototype for Huridocs. It lists the shortest paths between two records.

2Notes

A case, sketched

Figure 1. A case, sketched in code. The documents of a procedure link to one case record, and the case takes its coordinates from its place.

3Uwazi for research and OSINT I

Chapter 1

A case is a hub of documents

SUMMA keeps the Court’s and the Commission’s documents in one database. Each procedure has a case record, and every document of that procedure links to it.

The case lists its documents in relationship properties, fields whose values are links: Documentos de la CorteIDH for the Court’s, Documentos de la CIDH for the Commission’s. The relationship type names the kind of link. The property says which list on the case it fills.

A case also links to a place and inherits its coordinates. It appears on the map without storing a coordinate.

The next page counts one case’s links. The page after it draws the model.

4A case is a hub of documents

One case, its links

Relationship type	Links to	Links
Masacres de El Mozote
CorteIDH	Court documents: 7 resolutions, 3 presidency resolutions, 2 judgments, 2 hearings	14
CIDH	Commission documents: an admissibility report, a note sending the case to the Court, a merits report	3
País	its country, El Salvador	1
Geolocalización de los hechos del caso	its place, whose coordinates (13.902, −88.113) the case inherits	1
Medidas de Protección	a provisional measure	1
In all		20

The case record lists 16 Court documents. Two of them are not in the copy, so the copy counts 14 Court links and 20 links in all. No case in the copy lists more Court documents than 16; one other case lists as many.

The collection around it, live on 22 October 2026: 5,354 records, 19 templates, 17 relationship types and 423 cases. In the copy: 4,398 records in each of three languages, 18 templates, 337 cases and 16,998 links, 5,054 of them with no type.

Table 1. Masacres de El Mozote’s links in the research prototype’s public copy of SUMMA (1 July 2026), by relationship type. Live counts from SUMMA’s public API (summa.cejil.org/api); the copy’s from its public files, entities.json and relationships.json.

5Uwazi for research and OSINT I

How a case holds its documents

Figure 2. El Mozote in the copy. Its documents link to the case, and the case takes its place’s coordinates from the sheet below.

1Each document is its own record, with its own template.
2The case lists the documents in two fields, one for each body.
3The place is a record too. The case shows its coordinates by inheritance.

6How a case holds its documents

A case in the prototype

A column of a case’s facts: two lists of documents as coloured chips under their field names, a link reading Show all 16, a line reading 20 relationships, 20 entities, and a provisional measure.

Plate 1. The key facts of the case Masacres de El Mozote. The Court’s and the Commission’s documents are fields of the case, each a list of links to other records. The research prototype on its copy of SUMMA, CEJIL’s database (huridocs.github.io/uwazi-design/playground).

7Uwazi for research and OSINT I

Its links, grouped

A panel listing five groups of links, CorteIDH 14, País 1, CIDH 3, Geolocalización de los hechos del caso 1 and Medidas de Protección 1, under a row of view buttons.

Plate 2. The same case’s Relationships tab, its 20 links grouped by relationship type, each group with its count and its first records. The research prototype on its copy of SUMMA, CEJIL’s database (huridocs.github.io/uwazi-design/playground).

8Its links, grouped

Chapter 2

What connects two cases

“Connect to…” lists the shortest paths between two records, up to four hops, and names the relationship type of each hop.

In SUMMA most paths run through a few records. In the copy the Court is linked to 2,739 records and one country to 711. A path through the Court says only that both cases reached the Court.

The prototype skips such records by default in two of its collections: in a Nepal collection it skips sources and places, and in a collection of a real event’s public recordings, sources. For SUMMA it skips nothing. These pages apply the same rule to countries and organs and compare the paths.

Counts disagree for a similar reason. The busiest judge or commissioner in the copy has 440 links to 417 records: one view counts links, another counts records. In the old Relationships panel, my audit found one person read 349 on the tab, 327 in the graph and 326 on the profile.

9Uwazi for research and OSINT I

Three pairs of cases, measured

Cases	Countries, organs	Hops	Paths	Paths through
El Mozote to Caracazo	allowed	4	153	135: the Court
	skipped	4	13	all 13: one of 3 judges or commissioners
El Mozote to El Amparo	allowed	4	192	165: the Court
	skipped	4	22	all 22: one of 4 judges or commissioners
Caracazo to El Amparo	allowed	2	1	Venezuela
	skipped	4	8	all 8: one of 5 judges or commissioners

From El Mozote to Caracazo there are 153 shortest paths of four hops, and 135 of them pass the Court. Skip countries and organs and four hops still suffice: 13 paths remain, through two Court documents and a judge or commissioner linked to both.

Caracazo and El Amparo are both Venezuelan cases, so with countries allowed they are two hops apart, through Venezuela. Without countries they are four hops apart, like the others.

Table 2. Shortest paths of up to four hops between three place-named cases in the research prototype’s public copy of SUMMA (1 July 2026), measured when the page was built with the prototype’s search rewritten for this page. A path counts once per sequence of records.

10Three pairs of cases, measured

Try it

skip countries and organs

Figure 3. The shortest paths between two cases in the research prototype’s public copy of SUMMA (1 July 2026), found by the prototype’s search rewritten for this page. Pick two cases, skip countries and organs, and point at a record to see the paths through it.

11Uwazi for research and OSINT I

Two routes between two cases

Figure 4. El Mozote to Caracazo in the copy. Both routes are four hops long. The high one passes records that many others link to; the low one passes a judge or commissioner linked to documents of both cases.

1A block’s height stands for its links: the Court 2,739, Venezuela 385.
2With every record allowed, 135 of the 153 shortest paths pass the Court.
3With countries and organs skipped, 13 remain, each through a judge or commissioner.

12Two routes between two cases

Connect to, in the prototype

A dialog showing path 1 between Masacres de El Mozote and Caracazo, with the tabs Shortest paths and Shared neighbours, and the chain: a Court resolution, the Inter-American Court, Venezuela, Caracazo, with the relationship type of each hop between them.

Plate 3. “Connect to…” from El Mozote to Caracazo. The first path runs through a Court resolution, the Court and Venezuela. The dialog lists the first 20 shortest paths, all of four hops. The research prototype on its copy of SUMMA, CEJIL’s database (huridocs.github.io/uwazi-design/playground).

13Uwazi for research and OSINT I

The path, drawn

A small graph of a case and its linked records, with one blue line running from the case through a resolution, the Court and Venezuela to Caracazo.

Plate 4. The same path drawn in the case’s graph: four hops, and three of them through records that many others link to. The research prototype on its copy of SUMMA, CEJIL’s database (huridocs.github.io/uwazi-design/playground).

14The path, drawn

Where the numbers come from

Figure	Live	Copy
Records (Spanish)	5,354	4,398
Templates	19	18
Relationship types	17	12 named
Cases	423	337
Court judgments	506	409
Judges and commissioners	143	137
Links		16,998
Links with no type		5,054
The Court’s links		2,739
Court documents of a case		median 6, most 16

Table 3. Live: SUMMA’s public read API, summa.cejil.org/api (search, templates, relationtypes), read on 22 October 2026. Copy: the prototype’s public files of 1 July 2026, at huridocs.github.io/uwazi-design/playground/cejil-data, counted for this page. The copy holds each record in Spanish, English and Portuguese.

The model is described in HURIDOCS’s case study “SUMMA-CEJIL database” (doc-resources.uwazi.io), pages 3 to 10. The two separate databases are from HURIDOCS’s post of December 2017. The count of 349, 327 and 326 is from my own audit of the old panel, not a public page.

15Uwazi for research and OSINT I

In short

In SUMMA a case is the record its documents link to, and the links carry their type. That makes two cases easy to connect and hard to connect well: most paths pass the Court or a country, so a useful path search has to be told what to skip.

The prototype’s relationship tools were made for Huridocs and not shipped. Its copy of SUMMA is public. The next notebook covers who says so.

the case study

another notebook Uwazi for research and OSINT II

notebooks

16In short