ICA-Records in Contexts conceptual model and ontology

The Expert Group on Archival Description of the International Council on Archives (ICA-EGAD) is developing a generic, international, standard on archival description. This global framework will replace the four ICA existing standards (ISAD(G), ISAAR(CPF), ISDF and ISDAH) that were published between 1994 and 2008 and are now being used by the organizations and persons in charge of archival fonds; it will be based on the definition of the entities that together constitute the world of archives. Moreover, it aims to represent, in a clearer and more complete way than the previous standards, the layers of contexts in which records and record sets exist, from their creation to the events that may affect them once transferred in an archival repository. The target is to enable a multidimensional archival description, that is more accurate, that can be more easily accessed and understood by human users and that can also be more finely processed by the machines, than what you get when you use the four existing metadata standards. This new standard, named Records in Contexts (RiC), will consist of three parts: a global, entity-relationship, conceptual model (which will define the archival entities, their attributes and the relations that connect them to other entities); an ontology (i.e. a formal, OWL, representation of the conceptual model, that can in particular be used for creating and publishing online, as Linked Data, graphs of archival metadata expressed in RDF); and application guidelines. ICA-EGAD published a 0.1 version of RiC Conceptual Model (RiC-CM) in September 2016. A preview of RiC-CM v0.2, resulting from a significant amount of work (assessing the previous version, increasing its accuracy and changing its form) should be released by the end of November 2019. At the same time, a 0.1 version of RiC-Ontology (RiC-O) should also be published. Both releases will go along with a public call for comments. The presentation will give an overview of RiC-CM v0.2 and of the design principles of RiC-O. It will also show some concrete examples of RDF datasets conforming to RiC-O. From the projects that have been undertaken at the Archives nationales de France for two years, it will discuss the paths that RiC opens for archivists, records managers and users, including researchers, the issues that have to be solved and the ways that can be followed when implementing it, and, more generally speaking, the nature of the evolution that is just beginning.