Archivist as Agent

[Arian Rajh]

Hi, if I want to expand ontology classes (for purely theoretical reasons) with the sub-class Archivist under a class Agent, would it be more logical to put the Archivist under the Person or the Position class? 

Agent->Person->Archivist or Agent->Position->Archivist?

The Position would be a better choice for me, but the examples are confusing. Can the Position also be considered general, like presidents and archivists, not just The President of the Country XY or The state archivist of the country XY (please see RiC-CM 1-0., pages 30 and 31)?

 I'm doing theoretical research in ethics (archival ethics), so that is the reason for my question to the community.  In this sense, an Archivist is a carrier of several ethical characteristics. I'm just testing ethical concepts within the RIC ontology.

[Richard Williamson]

Hi,

Nice question! I think it would be natural to consider 'Archivist' a
profession, and thus RiC-A30 ('OccupationType') is very relevant.
Indeed the documentation for OccupationType in both RiC-CM and RiC-O
has some clarifications that relate directly to this.

https://www.ica.org/standards/RiC/RiC-O_v0-2.html#OccupationType

In short, one would I think consider 'Archivist' to be an entity in
the 'Value schema' of RiC-A30. More formally, in the ontology, one
would consider 'Archivist' an individual of class OccupationType (and
one might also make the individual have the type of some ontology of
professions outside of RiC). And then one can say that a Person has
the OccupationType 'Archivist'. To avoid confusion later, let me refer
to this occupation type as 'ArchivistOccupationType' rather than just
'Archivist'.

As for 'archivists' (plural), one could consider this to be the people
with occupation type Archivist. In the ontology, one can express this
formally (we use the singular by convention, i.e. defining the concept
Archivist which defines archivists):

Class Archivist:
SubClassOf: hasOccupationType value ArchivistOccupationType

(As an aside, RiC-CM also has RiC-A15 'Demographic Group'. In the
ontology, OccupationType is defined to be a sub-class of
DemographicGroup. This means that the OccupationType
'ArchivistOccupationType' is also to be considered to define a
DemographicGroup: one is not supposed to distinguish between
'Archivists' and 'Archivist' by saying that the former is a
DemographicGroup and the latter is an OccupationType, rather 'has
occupation type: ArchivistOccupationType' is just a more specific way
of saying 'belongs to demographic group: ArchivistOccupationType'.)

If we wish to assemble archivists into a RiC-E09 group, as I think is
reasonable (one can certainly think of all the archivists belonging to
a particular institution, say, as carrying out a 'coordinated
activity'), one would introduce an individual 'Archivists' of type
'Group', and make the notion of archivist as I defined it (individual
of type Archivist) more precise, by saying that an archivist is also a
member of this group:

Individual: Archivists
Type: Group

Class Archivist:
SubClassOf:
hasOccupationType value ArchivistOccupationType,
isOrWasMemberOf value Archivists.

When it comes to Position, in fact, in the ontology, Position is
formally disjoint from Person (and also from Group); one is only
supposed to relate a Position to a person, e.g. by RiC-R054 ('occupies
or occupied'). This disjointness formally expresses that a position
('head archivist' or whatever) is fundamentally independent of
whichever person holds it and of the entity at which it is carried
out. If one wished to express that 'head archivist' at Institution A
is a position that only be filled by archivists as I defined them
above, one thinks of this as defining a sub-relation of 'occupies or
occupied' with domain restricted to Archivist, i.e.

Class: ArchivalPosition
SubClassOf: Position

ObjectProperty: occupiesArchivalRole
SubPropertyOf: occupiesOrOccupied
Domain: Archivist
Range: ArchivalPosition

and then 'HeadArchivist' would be an individual of type 'ArchivalPosition'.

One can also consider 'archivist' to be a position at some institution
or company: to express this, one would introduce an individual, say
'ArchivistPosition', of type 'Position' or of my more specific
'ArchivalPosition', and link it using e.g. RiC-R056 ('exists or
existed in') to the relevant institution/company.

One of the things that one hopes for in the future are canonical
taxonomies/vocabularies for things like occupation types, so it may
well be that the individual 'ArchivistOccupationType' above will in
the future be able to be fetched from such a taxonomy rather than
having to define it oneself, and perhaps the kind of mechanics using
this individual that I have suggested above will too will simply be
able to fetched rather than having to be defined oneself.

I hope that this was somewhat helpful; as ever, this is just how I
read it, and if I have written anything egregious, I hope that people
will not hesitate to correct it!

Best wishes,
Richard

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[Arian Rajh]

Dear Richard, yes, indeed, this is very helpful! This is an excellent perspective on the topic. Thank you once again! 

[Daniel Pitti]

While I do much agree that Occupation Type is the correct designation, I would point out that in English language controlled concept vocabularies that it is the plural is used for demographic groups of which occupation type is one. I assume because it is naming a group.

If you have a look at the Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms, (LCDGT) you will see the plural used in the various types of groups identified:

https://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeLCDGT/freelcdgt.html

and

https://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeLCDGT/2023-DEMOGRAPHIC.pdf

While the LCDGT does include occupations, the Getty AAT has more extensive coverage. For archivists see:

https://www.getty.edu/vow/AATFullDisplay?find=archivists&logic=AND&note=&english=N&prev_page=1&subjectid=300162133

Regards,

Daniel

[Richard Williamson]

Nice! Thanks!

When writing my original message, I was grappling with the fact that
the demographic group ('archivists') would be more naturally expressed
in the plural, whilst the the occupation type, to my ears at least,
would more naturally be expressed in the singular ('archivist');
since, as I wrote in my parenthetical aside, OccupationType is a
subclass of DemographicGroup, one has to kind of choose one or the
other in the first instance. Probably the simplest way to allow for
both would be to introduce two individuals, one for the
DemographicGroup and one for the OccupationType, and assert that they
are the same:

Individual: Archivists
Types: DemographicGroup

Individual: Archivist
Types: OccupationType
SameAs: Archivists

It is also possible to take the point of view that the syntax of IRIs
is not very important (i.e. could be anything, maybe not human
readable) and that this kind of thing is better expressed through use
of various properties/facts; but I like human-readable IRIs myself!

In addition to grappling with the above, I was also grappling with
trying not to re-use 'Archivist', to avoid confusion. As many people
will know this, prefixes could be used in one's ontology for this,
rather than circumnavigations like 'ArchivistOccupationType' of the
kind I used. I paste now my entire example again below in full, with
prefixes and with Daniel's feedback taken into account, just to
illustrate how it can look, in case it's useful for somebody. One
could go further and formally link to the vocabularies Daniel
mentioned, etc. (In case it's confusing, I do think use of 'Archivist'
in the singular for the class below is right conventionally; this is
in accord with RiC's use of 'Person' rather than 'People', etc.)

Individual: demographic_group:Archivists
Types: rico:DemographicGroup

Individual: occupation_type:Archivist
Types: rico:OccupationType
SameAs: demographic_group:Archivists

Individual: group:Archivists
Types: rico:Group

Class: person_class:Archivist
SubClassOf:
rico:hasOccupationType value occupation_type:Archivist,
rico:isOrWasMemberOf value group:Archivists.

Class: position_class:Archival
SubClassOf: rico:Position

ObjectProperty: occupiesArchivalRole
SubPropertyOf: rico:occupiesOrOccupied
Domain: person_class:Archivist
Range: position_class:Archival

Individual: position:HeadArchivist
Types: position_class:Archival

Individual: corporate_body:InstitutionA
Types: rico:CorporateBody

Individual: position:ArchivistAtInstitutionA
Types: position_class:Archival
Facts: rico:existsOrExistedIn corporate_body:InstitutionA,

Individual: person:MyFavouriteArchivist
Types: rico:Person
Facts: occupiesArchivalRole position:ArchivistAtInstitutionA

Best wishes,
Richard

[Arian Rajh]

Good examples, but how could we describe an Archivist by assigning them some characteristic (traits) and linking it to some behaviour? By using the shema.org “description“ property? Is there any taxonomy that includes the “behaviour“ class, something from the domain of psychology?
Kindly,
Arian
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> 28.11.2023., u 10:07, korisnik Richard Williamson <richard.william...@gmail.com> je napisao:
>
> Nice! Thanks!

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[Arian Rajh]

Has anyone considered how to describe Archivist(s) (i.e. an instance of rico:OccupationType) with 1) some "characteristics" (qualities) and link them to 2) particular "behaviour" (sub)class - by using external taxonomies (like Schema.org or maybe some psychology-related taxonomy for describing the concept of behaviour)?

[Florence Clavaud]

Hi,

Just my two cents in this discussion (with many thanks to Richard for his answers and ideas).

I do not know if somebody else here has considered to describe the behavior and features of an archivist, or of any other Person.

I would be very interested in knowing a bit more in which context or within which project you would like to do so. Is it a research project in social science?

Anyway you will not find any property or class of the kind in RiC-O to address this need for now. 

We have concentrated on the core, and, also, on the history of agents or their relations with other agents.

However, I can remember some first versions of RiC-O where we took the DOLCE+DnS Ultralite (DUL) upper ontology as a point of departure. In this upper onotlogy, I think you can find some useful components.

See this: http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Ontology:DOLCE+DnS_Ultralite

RiC-O, as a model about archival description, is a domain ontology, which does not include any very high level property or class as DUL. It may be considered a gap, and we may try to fill this gap in the future.

I also have had a (too quick) look at CIDOC-CRM about this, and at first glance I could see nothing which would address your need. But I may be wrong.

Finally, I just want to emphasize that you should rather consider using RiC-O 1.0-beta than RiC-O 0.2, which is now obsolete.

For now you will not find this version ( RiC-O 1.0-beta) using the IRI of RiC-O, since, due to a migration process at ICA, we cannot publish RiC-O 1.0 on the ICA website.

You will only find it on GitHub, with a HTML version: https://github.com/ICA-EGAD/RiC-O/releases/tag/v1.0-beta

RiC-O 1.0 is on its way; we will probaly release it by December 9 at the latest.

Best regards,

Florence Clavaud
Executive member of ICA/EGAD, lead of RiC-O development team
Conservatrice générale du patrimoine | General curator
Responsable du Lab des Archives nationales | head of the Lab
Direction du numérique et de la conservation
Archives nationales de France

[Arian Rajh]

Dear Florence, Richard, Daniel, dear all,

I found RIC-O 1.0. on GitHub, as its publication was mentioned on RIC study day this month. I was listening online in a hotel during another business trip, and it was an excellent conference.

My question may be unusual, but I'm considering an archival ethics-related model, a mixture of deontology (as in the ICA Code of Ethics) and ethics of quality (as in Cline's Archival Virtue, 2021 ). Thus, I asked about behaviour + characteristics/traits/qualities/virtues. I want to represent the concepts of qualities/characteristics/traits and resulting behaviours (considered according to Allport's Pattern and growth in personality, 1961, traits as dynamic determinants of behaviour) as linked data and present them visually as a verification method, foremost for myself, and maybe for a journal paper that I'm writing in this period. (E.g., describe the Archivist using a turtle file and upload it to GraphDB or a similar tool. At first, I considered using the RIC in the prefix. I'll give myself a couple more days to search for the behaviour class in some external vocabulary.)

Ultimately, representing an ethical model with its concepts through linked data may be a dead-end. However, it was intriguing to discuss the Archivist as an abstract individual and to position it under various RIC-O parts. It may be helpful for various purposes.

Kind regards,
Arian

[Arian Rajh]

Dear Richard, 

Shouldn't we consider the Archivist as a subclass of the OccupationType class (a subclass of the DemographicGroup class) rather than the individual of an OccupationType class? Isn't this ("Archivist") too general to be an individual? It seems to me it would be natural to define the Archivist as a concept of description logic, and concepts would relate to ontology classes and subclasses. Is there a particular reason to regard the Archivist as an individual?

Kind regards,

Arian

Dana ponedjeljak, 27. studenoga 2023. u 15:50:23 UTC+1 korisnik richard.william...@gmail.com napisao je:

[Richard Williamson]

Dear Arian,

Good to discuss this point, thank you for the question! I think it is
important to be careful about not overloading the term 'archivist'
here; I unfortunately was quite guilty of this in my original reply to
you, my apologies, but tried to improve upon this in a later message,
namely the following one (in the example at the end, prefixes are
carefully used).

https://groups.google.com/g/Records_in_Contexts_users/c/qc4PqaZVF24/m/bzpOd33tAQAJ

Indeed, by saying

Individual: occupation_type:Archivist
Types: rico:OccupationType

we are just asserting that there is an occupation type 'archivist'.
Purely on its own, this says nothing really semantically, it is just a
piece of syntax, that has no more to do with archivists semantically
than if I had written 'occupation_type:Greengrocer'; it is at this
point just a placeholder, a receptacle for meaning. It acquires
meaning through use: the property 'rico:hasOrHadOccupationOfType'
allows us to relate it to other individuals.

In particular, I agree with you regarding viewing 'Archivist' as a
class: if we wish to explicitly introduce the concept 'Archivist',
that is to say introduce syntax which is intended to explicitly refer
to that concept, then introducing a class 'Archivist' is the right
thing to do. I did in fact do this in my earlier messages...

Class: person_class:Archivist
SubClassOf:
rico:hasOrHadOccupationOfType value occupation_type:Archivist,

rico:isOrWasMemberOf value group:Archivists

... (where 'group:Archivists' is defined there, it is not very
important for us here). In particular, the restriction classes imply
that an Archivist is a rico:Person with occupation type
'occupation_type:Archivist'. From this, 'occupation_type:Archivist'
can acquire a rich meaning, because we could define any number of
properties with domain 'person_class:Archivist', and
'occupation_type:Archivist' becomes related to all of these via the
restriction class.

All that said, one might well choose not to make the concept of
'Archivist' fully explicit in this way. Just taking a rico:Person and
asserting rico:hasOrHadOccupationOfType occupation_type:Archivist
already relates occupation_type:Archivist to all of the other
properties which the person has, in the same way as in my previous
paragraph, and gives 'occupation_type:Archivist' the same richness of
meaning: making the concept 'Archivist' explicit syntactically as a
class is irrelevant for this, the purpose of doing so would rather be
for interoperability reasons (establishing a common semantics for it
for all users of one's ontology) or some other consideration.

Does that clarify the matter a little?

Best wishes,
Richard

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[Arian Rajh]

Dear Richard,

Yes, indeed, it makes sense. Thank you very much for your interesting comments. It depends on what concept is needed.

A similar thing could perhaps be said about modeling fonds/series/file/collection as instances of Thing/Type/RecordSetType instead of (optionally used) subclasses of the Thing/RecordResource/RecordSet class.

Kindly,

Arian

[Florence Clavaud]

Dear Arian and Richard,

Just my two small cents, to say that RiC-O already includes a few instances of rico:RecordSetType (fonds, collection, file and series) and of rico:DocumentaryFormType (finding aid and authority record).

These are also declared as instances of skos:Concept.

See about this:

- https://www.ica.org/standards/RiC/RiC-O_1-0-1.html#named-individuals

- for example, as concerns the fonds, https://www.ica.org/standards/RiC/vocabularies/recordSetTypes#Fonds (cannot be dereferenced yet, sorry; but you can access the HTML representation here: https://www.ica.org/standards/RiC/RiC-O_1-0-1.html#Fonds

See also, in the modularized version of RiC-O, the two SKOS vocabularies : https://github.com/ICA-EGAD/RiC-O/tree/master/ontology/current-version/modularized-version, and the skos:scopeNote of each of the ConceptSchemes defined.

The idea would be to enrich those vocabularies collaboratively in the future, and also to create other multilingual ones, e.g. one for the instances of rico:ActivityType and one for the instances of rico:OccupationType ;-).

Best regards,

Florence

Florence Clavaud
Executive member of ICA/EGAD ; lead of RiC-O development team

Conservatrice générale du patrimoine | General curator

Responsable du Lab des Archives nationales de France| head of the Lab, Archives nationales de France

[Richard Williamson]

Very nice, thank you both!

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