Good way to show the structure of record set

[Arian Rajh]

Dear all,

What would be a good way, or recommended practice, to show the structure of a record set (no matter to which level it pertains) - 

A) to use data property rico:structure, 

B) to use object property rico:containsOrContained, 

C) to use some other property;

and then 

a) to list contained smaller record sets or records in the object list, 

b) to use RDF containers or 

c) RDF collections for listing contained smaller record sets or records?

I have looked at examples on GitHub, but I'd like to know if anyone has a recommendation concerning this.

Kindly,

Arian

[Florence Clavaud]

Dear Arian,

If you have several Record Sets that include other Records or Records Sets, and you consider them as entities, the best method (I would say obviously) to connect the 'upper' or bigger Record Set with each of its included Records or Record Sets, would be to use, not rico:containsOrContained which has domain and range rico:Place, but rico:includesOrIncluded or one of its subproperties,

rico:structure, or to be more accurate, rico:recordResourceStructure, is a datatype property, to be used, therefore, only to connect a Record Resource and a litteral, i.e. some text about the composition of the Record Resource. You cannot use it to connect two Record Sets. See also its rdfs:comment: "Information about the intellectual arrangement and composition of a Record Resource. For Record and Record Part, it encompasses information about the  intellectual composition of the record, the presence of record parts and their functions. For Record Set, it encompasses information about the methodology or criteria used for  arranging the Record Set members or Record members within the containing Record Set."

You also can use, along with rico:includesOrIncluded, rico:directlyPrecedesInSequence (and.or its inverse property), in order to specify, for example, that a series that is included in a Record Set precedes another series. Which corresponds to (or makes explicit) what a sequence of EAD <c> elements means in an EAD finding aid. On this topic, see also https://github.com/ICA-EGAD/RiC-O/issues/97.

You can find examples using the two object properties (to be more precise, rico:directlyIncludes and rico:directlyPrecedesInSequence) on GitHub, in this folder: https://github.com/ICA-EGAD/RiC-O/tree/master/examples/examples_v1-0, or in the release. Both the examples from the University of Strathclyde Archives and the Archives nationales de France use them. 

Hope this helps.

Best,

Florence Clavaud
Head of the Lab, Archives nationales de France
Executive member of ICA/EGAD, lead of RiC-O development team

[Arian Rajh]

Dear Florence, yes, indeed, it helps. So, I should keep it simple and use these object properties in an object list, e.g.

<record_set> rico:directlyIncludes <record1> , <record2> , <record3> .

or 

<big_box> rico:includesOrIncluded <small box1> , <small_box2> , <small_box3>  .

etc.

Thank you.

[Murad Ali]

THANK