Inquiry Regarding the Application of RiC-O in a Arts Archives Context
Gyeongbo Kim
Dear all,
My name is Gyeongbo Kim, a project researcher at the Art Archives, Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA AA) (https://sema.seoul.go.kr/semaaa), an institution dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary and secondary sources on modern and contemporary art and related fields and practices. Recently, we undertook a pilot project applying the official Records in Contexts standards (RiC-CM v1.0 and RiC-O v1.0.2) to a collection of the Korean artist Rim Dongsik.
For your reference, we have shared a beta version of our RDF-based visualization and data model on GitHub:
→ https://github.com/SeMA-AA/Rim-Dongsik-Collection-RiC
Through this endeavor, we encountered several practical and conceptual challenges, which I would like to share with you below.
1. Limitations of Applying RiC Structures in Arts Archives
Our institution primarily manages institutional records generated through exhibitions, programs, and acquisitions, as well as Art records collected by artists, researchers, and cultural intermediaries. These differ significantly in character from administrative documents or library-based collections.
While metadata standards such as CDWA, which focus on the description of individual artworks in museum contexts are well-suited to museum collections, we have found provenance-based standards like ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF) to be more appropriate for Art records. RiC provides a more flexible and relationship-centered conceptual model, which we greatly appreciate. However, we have found it difficult to fully express the complex structures and relationalities specific to visual arts practices.
For example, the model does not currently define an entity that explicitly corresponds to an “artwork”, so we chose to map artworks to the generic Thing class. Similarly, as RiC-O lacks relationships tailored to the visual arts context, we had to rely on broader, higher-level relationships, which sometimes felt imprecise.
2. Defining and Managing New Entities
In order to more accurately reflect the nature of our records, we are considering defining additional entities. We would appreciate any guidance you might be able to provide on the following points:
- Are extensions to RiC-O entities and properties formally governed by the ICA?
- Is it acceptable for institutions to define and implement new Entities independently, provided they remain consistent with the overall logic of the model?
- If so, is there an official process for documenting or sharing such extensions with the broader archival community?
(To be continued in the next message...)
Gyeongbo Kim
(Continued from previous message)
3. Challenges in RDF-Based Visualization
We mapped our data using RiC-CM and converted it into RDF format for implementation in a graph database. However, the core relationship-driven logic of RiC was not effectively conveyed in the visualizations. Moreover, there are very few tools currently available that can manage and visualize ontology-based data using OWL and RDF, and most of these are not regularly updated. This has led us to consider whether alternative approaches—such as markup-based representations—might offer more expressive and user-friendly results.
- Are OWL-based tools necessary for effectively visualizing and interpreting RiC-O data?
- Are there specific tools or methods recommended by the ICA for clearly presenting the relational structures that are central to RiC-O?
Summary of Questions:
1. Are there other standards or approaches you would recommend for effectively representing the complex relationships and attributes found in visual arts archives, which may not be fully supported by traditional hierarchical models or RiC-CM?
2. Does the ICA formally govern the extension of RiC-O entities? If not, what guidance exists for institutions defining their own?
3. Are there recommended other tools or best practices for visualizing RiC-O data, especially when RDF-based tools fail to accurately convey relationship structures?
We are sincerely grateful to the ICA for your dedicated work in developing the Records in Contexts standard. We hope that our efforts to explore its application in the field of arts might contribute to ongoing conversations and future development.
Thank you very much for your time and consideration. I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Gyeongbo Kim
Tobias Wildi
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Pavel Zhelnov
Florence Clavaud
Dear all,
My name is Gyeongbo Kim, a project researcher at the Art Archives, Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA AA) (https://sema.seoul.go.kr/semaaa), an institution dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary and secondary sources on modern and contemporary art and related fields and practices. Recently, we undertook a pilot project applying the official Records in Contexts standards (RiC-CM v1.0 and RiC-O v1.0.2) to a collection of the Korean artist Rim Dongsik.
For your reference, we have shared a beta version of our RDF-based visualization and data model on GitHub:
→ https://github.com/SeMA-AA/Rim-Dongsik-Collection-RiC
Through this endeavor, we encountered several practical and conceptual challenges, which I would like to share with you below.
1. Limitations of Applying RiC Structures in Arts Archives
[...]
2. Defining and Managing New Entities
In order to more accurately reflect the nature of our records, we are considering defining additional entities. We would appreciate any guidance you might be able to provide on the following points:
- Are extensions to RiC-O entities and properties formally governed by the ICA?
No, ICA/EGAD does not manage such extensions for now. RiC-O has been released under a CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), you can use it just as you want, provided that you give appropriate credit to ICA/EGAD.
- Is it acceptable for institutions to define and implement new Entities independently, provided they remain consistent with the overall logic of the model?
- If so, is there an official process for documenting or sharing such extensions with the broader archival community?
There is no specific official process for documenting or sharing such extensions of RiC-O for now. However, we know that several extensions of RiC-O already exist; and it would be a good idea to help implementers know who is working on what, and where they have released some extension. So we are going to think of some process, which could be (this is just some first idea) some kind of 'registry'.
Anyway, if you produce some extension for a project then create datasets that conform to such an extension, of course you could try and publish them, including the ontology. As concerns the ontology, you could do so following the W3C ‘Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies’ (https://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/). RiC-O follows recipe 3 of this document.
Also, again as indicated to Arian yesterday, if you consider that certain components of your extension are of general interest and could be usefully integrated into RiC-O, let us know what you have done (send an email to this list, or to us directly, or else create an issue on GitHub).
Or else, before creating any extension, just create an issue on GitHub and share your ideas or proposals with the RiC-O EGAD team.
As we have already done in other cases, we will then be able to discuss them with you and see what we can do (I mean, if we agree on adding what you suggest directly to RiC-O).
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
Florence Clavaud
(Continued from previous message)
3. Challenges in RDF-Based Visualization
We mapped our data using RiC-CM and converted it into RDF format for implementation in a graph database. However, the core relationship-driven logic of RiC was not effectively conveyed in the visualizations. Moreover, there are very few tools currently available that can manage and visualize ontology-based data using OWL and RDF, and most of these are not regularly updated. This has led us to consider whether alternative approaches—such as markup-based representations—might offer more expressive and user-friendly results.
- Are OWL-based tools necessary for effectively visualizing and interpreting RiC-O data?
- Are there specific tools or methods recommended by the ICA for clearly presenting the relational structures that are central to RiC-O?
We recommend no specific visualization tool. Building visualization interfaces that truly allow users to explore a dense directed graph (i.e. a graph that includes a significant number of nodes and arcs of various kinds, in whatever serialization format the graph is expressed) in a fluid and interactive way, while being able to distinguish those nodes and arcs (to know what they represent) is an interesting topic in both technical and design terms. Using Javascript libraries (e.g. D3, https://d3js.org/; this is just an example, not a recommendation!) and JSON-LD seems quite unavoidable. Of course such interfaces can come within a complete website where other functionalities (co)exist.
Best regards,
Florence
--
Florence Clavaud
Executive member of ICA/EGAD ; lead of RiC-O development team
[...]
Baptiste De Coulon
Dear Kim,
For visualization RDF, https://www.semspect.de/ worth a try. Feel free to contact the company. They are very helpful and open.
Best Regards
Baptiste (baptiste...@sapa.swiss)
De : records_in_c...@googlegroups.com <records_in_c...@googlegroups.com>
De la part de Gyeongbo Kim
Envoyé : mardi, 10 juin 2025 16:59
À : Records_in_Contexts_users <records_in_c...@googlegroups.com>
Objet : [Records in Contexts users] Re: Inquiry Regarding the Application of RiC-O in a Arts Archives Context
(Continued from previous message)
3. Challenges in RDF-Based Visualization
We mapped our data using RiC-CM and converted it into RDF format for implementation in a graph database. However, the core relationship-driven logic of RiC was not effectively conveyed in the visualizations. Moreover, there are very few tools currently available that can manage and visualize ontology-based data using OWL and RDF, and most of these are not regularly updated. This has led us to consider whether alternative approaches—such as markup-based representations—might offer more expressive and user-friendly results.
- Are OWL-based tools necessary for effectively visualizing and interpreting RiC-O data?
- Are there specific tools or methods recommended by the ICA for clearly presenting the relational structures that are central to RiC-O? Dear Kim,
Summary of Questions:
1. Are there other standards or approaches you would recommend for effectively representing the complex relationships and attributes found in visual arts archives, which may not be fully supported by traditional hierarchical models or RiC-CM?
2. Does the ICA formally govern the extension of RiC-O entities? If not, what guidance exists for institutions defining their own?
3. Are there recommended other tools or best practices for visualizing RiC-O data, especially when RDF-based tools fail to accurately convey relationship structures?
We are sincerely grateful to the ICA for your dedicated work in developing the Records in Contexts standard. We hope that our efforts to explore its application in the field of arts might contribute to ongoing conversations and future development.
Thank you very much for your time and consideration. I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Gyeongbo Kim
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Gyeongbo Kim
Dear all,
Thank you very much for your interest in our work.
In particular, we would like to respond to one specific question we received — regarding the modeling of IRIs within our own namespace — as follows:
While we have established internal rules for naming the URIs or IRIs of SeMA AA, we have not yet created any actual URIs or IRIs. In other words, there are currently no identifiers that concretely link nodes to resources.
Our initial approach was to input instances and visualize them by directly applying RiC-O v1.0.2, as provided by the ICA-EGAD, based on the view that such nodes and resources only hold meaningful value when they are truly linked.
Of course, we are aware that, in the long term, URIs or IRIs must be assigned to each node.
As the official version of RiC is still in its early stages of expansion and application, we understand that there are many areas that will require further development.
Your responses and advice have been immensely helpful and will serve as valuable reference points as we work to chart a clearer path forward.
We deeply appreciate your support.
Best regards,
Gyeongbo Kim