Release of RiC Application Guidelines (RiC-AG) v0.1

[CLAVAUD Florence]

Dear RiC users,

After months of intensive work, the EGAD group is delighted to announce the publication of version 0.1 of RiC Application Guidelines (RiC-AG).

RiC-AG is currently available online as a website, accessible at https://ica-egad.github.io/RiC-AG/. We will also be publishing a PDF version soon.

If you wish to browse the website locally on your computer, you can download the release at : https://github.com/ICA-EGAD/RiC-AG/releases/tag/v0.1.0. Once download and unzipped, you will find the website in the 'docs' subfolder (the home page is the index.html page). 

RiC-AG is the last of the four complementary documents that constitute the Records in Contexts standard and address the activity of describing records. It is intended to provide archival practitioners, developers, and managers guidance in understanding and implementing archival description systems based on RiC, particularly focusing on the RiC Conceptual Model (RiC-CM).

When designing the AG, EGAD took into account the comments received on RiC-CM 2.0, the user stories gathered in 2024, feedback from users who already have implemented RiC, and many discussions held with members of the concerned communities. Nevertheless, while RiC-AG aims to provide broad guidance that will be helpful across a range of scenarios, it does not offer specific guidance that will address every possible user context.

RiC-AG is a draft document. With the initial release, the EGAD invites the community to provide feedback.

RiC-AG is dynamically generated from sources managed on GitHub. The EGAD group will therefore be able to develop it step by step, whether it involves modifying details, adding new sections or FAQs.

Best regards,

Florence Clavaud,
Head of the Lab, Archives nationales de France
Chair of EGAD

---

Merci de nous aider à préserver l'environnement en n'imprimant ce courriel et les documents joints que si nécessaire.

[Jochen Deprez]

Hello,

I just did a full read through, very well-made and clear guidelines to get started! I really like the example given in the "Getting started" chapter, especially the link with RiC-O. The "form" approach and then the final graph view is a good way to represent the data entered and the final result. 

What i feel is still missing though, are the following:

1. The example represented in Excel, since this is a tool many archivists use in order to store and prepare data.
2. A full RiC-O example (so the same thing, but in RiC-O).
3. A full example in turtle-triples and/or XML (so the same thing again, but now in turtle or XML, so we can import this in software).
4. Guidelines on how to visualise the data using software like GraphDB, Jena, ...
5. Guidelines on how to set up a SPARQL search engine.
6. Guidelines on how to translate this to a user-friendly web application front end so the public can research the data.

This way, we can full grasp the concept and the possible approaches into implementing it, step-by-step, both full-scale with all bells and whistles, but also more ad-hoc and "quick and dirty". I once saw a demonstration of Ivo Zandhuis (City Archives of Amsterdam) about implementing RiC-O with Excel, i'd like to see this in a formal guideline if possible.

Another question: The note-taking app Obsidian makes it possible to "link" notes and generate a graph view. Would this be usable with RiC, as a way to get a feel for it? 

Greetings,

Jochen Deprez

Archivist and information manager DVV Midwest, Belgium

Op vr 31 okt 2025 om 12:06 schreef CLAVAUD Florence <florence...@culture.gouv.fr>:

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Records_in_Contexts_users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to Records_in_Context...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/Records_in_Contexts_users/PR0P264MB3289D992BBC7389D7CB106F0D5F8A%40PR0P264MB3289.FRAP264.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM.

[Hope, Aaron (MPBSDP)]

Dear Florence and EGAD,

Thank you for sharing the much anticipated RiC-AG. I have been reviewing it over the last couple weeks and am impressed at the work that has gone into this resource. I found it helpful in confirming some of our modelling decisions and it also offers a lot of very interesting possibilities for future development that I will ponder over the long-term.  A few quick comments and observations:

1) The Record described in section 6c.3 (“When does a derived Instantiation represent a new Record?”) which is re-used as a researcher’s source material and/or evidence in a criminal investigation and thereby becomes a new Record: if the informational content of the original Record hasn’t changed, couldn’t one simply position the same Record in the new context(s)? In other words, can’t a single Record be modelled in multiple Record Sets?

2) The possibilities for modelling intricate details of activities, records, instantiations, agents etc. through time are fascinating but also probably beyond the scope of what an archivist can typically do manually. Therefore, I wonder if some future revision of RiC-AG could include a section on automation of descriptive efforts?

3) Another possible area for guidance in future might be considerations when designing a structure for URIs/IRIs: whether to embed human-readable meaning or not, how to generate unique values, when to use existing external URIs vs internal ones etc. etc.

Anyway, my thanks again to Florence, Richard and the whole EGAD team.

Regards,
Aaron Hope

 

From: records_in_c...@googlegroups.com <records_in_c...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of CLAVAUD Florence
Sent: October 31, 2025 7:07 AM
To: 'Google Groups' via Records_in_Contexts_users <records_in_c...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [Records in Contexts users] Release of RiC Application Guidelines (RiC-AG) v0.1

 

CAUTION -- EXTERNAL E-MAIL - Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender.

--