Records in Contexts-Ontology (RiC-O) is an OWL ontology for describing archival record resources and their contextual entities. It is the third part of the Records in Contexts standard, which also includes Foundations of Archival Description (RiC-FAD) and a Conceptual Model (RiC-CM). The version 1.0 of RiC-FAD, RiC-CM, and RiC-O, that was released in late 2023, marks the first stable and complete version of the first three parts of RiC, and thus a major milestone in the development of the standard. EGAD is now working on creating the fourth and final part of RiC: Application Guidelines (RiC-AG).

RiC-O is a formal representation of RiC-CM.

RiC-O provides a generic vocabulary and formal rules for creating RDF datasets (or generating them from existing archival metadata) that describe in a consistent way any kind of archival record resource and its contextual entities. It is therefore a reference model for publishing archival metadata sets as Linked Data, querying them using SPARQL, and making inferences using the logic of the ontology.

RiC-O version 1.0 is available from the following page: https://github.com/ICA-EGAD/RiC-O/tree/master/ontology/current-version. You also can download, in addition to RiC-O 1.0, examples and complementary resources, from here: https://github.com/ICA-EGAD/RiC-O/releases/tag/v1.0 (download the zip file and unzip it); the release notes provide a list of the changes made from RiC-O 0.2. Any person who has an account on GitHub can clone or fork the repository, create issues or create comments on the existing issues, and thus contribute to the development of RiC-O. There also is an information website about RiC-O: https://ica-egad.github.io/RiC-O/.

Please note that the RiC-O IRI (https://www.ica.org/standards/RiC/ontology) is temporarily unavailable while the ICA website is moving to a new website. Once the IRI is reestablished, it will enable human readers access to a HTML representation of RiC-O and enable machine access to the RDF/OWL source file.

Anyone interested in learning more about or discussing RiC with others is encouraged to join the RiC user group. Both description of the scope and purpose of the group and instructions for joining will be found here: https://groups.google.com/g/Records_in_Contexts_users/

See also

English
Expert Group on Archival Description - EGAD

Records In Contexts – Foundations of Archival Descriptions

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English
Expert Group on Archival Description - EGAD

Records In Context – Conceptual Model

pdf