Records in Contexts - Ontology
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ICA RiC-O (Records in Contexts-Ontology) is an OWL ontology for describing archival record resources and their contextual entities. As the third part of Records in Contexts standard, it is a formal representation of Records in Contexts Conceptual Model (RiC-CM).
The latest public release of RiC-O is RiC-0 0.2, that was published in February 2021. It is compliant with the latest version of Records in Contexts-Conceptual Model (RiC-CM), RiC-CM 0.2, which was released in July 2021.
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 has the following URI: https://www.ica.org/standards/RiC/ontology. Using this URI, human readers can access an HTML representation of RiC-O, while machines can access its RDF/OWL source file.
RiC-O 0.2 remains a draft. RiC-O will continue to evolve, the next milestone being the release of RiC-O 1.0, which will take place in 2022, at the same time as RiC-IAD 1.0 and RiC-CM 1.0.
The latest version of RiC-O source file, as well as earlier versions, has been continuously available since March 2020 in a public Git repository on GitHub (https://github.com/ICA-EGAD/RiC-O). This repository also includes diagrams and examples, that have been updated and enriched. Any person who has an account on Github can clone or fork the repository, create issues or create comments on the existing issues, thus contribute to the development of RiC-O.
RiC-O also comes with a small website, that provides complementary information, particularly as concerns the list of existing proofs of concept on RiC-O, of research programs that use it, of present and future implementations of RiC-O in archival information systems, and of tools based on RiC-O (https://ica-egad.github.io/RiC-O/projects-and-tools.html).