ICA Records in Contexts-Ontology (RiC-O): a Semantic Framework for Describing Archival Resources

This article gives an overview of the new Records in Contexts Ontology (RiC-O), which is available at https://www.ica.org/standards/RiC/ontology. This ontology is part of the Records in Contexts (RiC) standard, which has been developed by the International Council on Archives to describe and contextualize archival resources in a comprehensible way that goes beyond the possibilities of the existing archival standards. The article explains the rationale for developing a new standard for archival description, and particularly the ontology. It provides a quick overview of the RiC Conceptual Model and then focuses on RiC-O, its design principles and content and giving references to more precise documentation that is publicly available online. Finally, it presents the roadmap and future perspectives of RiC.