The list is based on the same discussions that were had during the development of the interview protocols and questionnaire about what the organization wants to know from the data. The latter suggestion is far more detailed than the former, and it requires that the person using the list have more skill to distinguish between similar violation types. The list of types of violence is called the controlled vocabulary of types of violence. When people read questionnaires and classify the descriptions of violence in terms of one or another particular type of violence in the controlled vocabulary, they are coding. Using the controlled vocabulary to code an interview, a document, or a piece of physical evidence is called data processing .
Data processing can be very time consuming, and it can require skilled staff to do it.
After the organization has defined extensive rules about how interviews are to be conducted, about how documents are to be analyzed, and about how physical evidence is supposed to be recorded, a great deal more work is required before the information is ready to be entered into a database. There are several controlled vocabularies necessary for human rights work. The most obvious such list is the list of types of violence discussed earlier. Other lists might include regions of the country, organizations in the country's army and security forces, or kinds of vehicles favored by perpetrators. Each list should be composed of mutually exclusive items so that each classification of an act, a place, a military unit, or a vehicle is unambiguous.