Federal Act
on the Harmonisation of the Register of Residents
and of other Official Registers of Persons
(Register Harmonisation Act, RHA)

In this Act the terms be­low are defined as fol­lows:

a.

re­gister of res­id­ents: re­gister main­tained manu­ally or elec­tron­ic­ally by the can­ton or the com­mune, in which any­one who is per­man­ently settled or is res­id­ent in the can­ton or in the com­mune is re­cor­ded;

b.

com­mune of per­man­ent set­tle­ment:com­mune in which a per­son resides with the in­ten­tion of re­main­ing there per­man­ently, in or­der to es­tab­lish the fo­cus of his or her life there, as must be re­cog­nis­able to oth­ers; a per­son is re­garded as per­man­ently settled in the com­mune in which he or she has de­pos­ited the re­quired doc­u­ment, and may have only one com­mune of per­man­ent set­tle­ment;

c.

com­mune of res­id­ence: com­mune in which a per­son resides for a spe­cif­ic pur­pose, without the in­ten­tion of re­main­ing there per­man­ently, for a min­im­um of three con­sec­ut­ive months or three months with­in a single year; res­id­ency for the pur­pose of at­tend­ing a edu­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tion or school and the ac­com­mod­a­tion of a per­son in a cor­rect­ive, res­id­en­tial, or pen­al in­sti­tu­tion or hos­pit­al con­sti­tute a com­mune of res­id­ence;

d.

house­hold: unit com­pris­ing every­one who lives in the same dwell­ing;

e.

iden­ti­fi­er: non-de­script­ive and in­vari­able num­ber which, as a func­tion­al ele­ment in a data­base, per­mits the clear iden­ti­fic­a­tion of a per­son or art­icle;

f.

at­trib­ute: prop­erty of a per­son or art­icle that may be ob­ject­ively re­cor­ded and de­scribed;

g.

at­trib­ute char­ac­ter­ist­ic: spe­cif­ic value that an at­trib­ute may ac­quire;

h.

no­men­clature: sys­tem for the clas­si­fic­a­tion and present­a­tion of at­trib­ute char­ac­ter­ist­ics;

i.

cod­ing key: code col­lec­tion that en­ables the tran­scrip­tion of at­trib­ute char­ac­ter­ist­ics re­cor­ded in text form in­to nu­mer­ic­al val­ues that can be pro­cessed in the com­puter sys­tems.