About the book
Records in Contexts (RiC) is the new standard for archival description from the Expert Group on Archival Description (EGAD) of the International Council on Archives. It replaces the four earlier standards ISAD(G), ISAAR(CPF), ISDF and ISDIAH with a conceptual model, RiC-CM, and an ontology that formalises it in OWL, RiC-O.
The primary sources are documents written for implementers, not for people meeting the standard for the first time. This book is written for that first encounter. It is based throughout on RiC-FAD 1.0, RiC-CM 1.0, RiC-O 1.1 and RiC-AG 0.1 --- the text, the OWL source, the official documentation, the official crosswalks and the sample data --- and it covers what the move from multilevel to multidimensional description actually means, how to read entities, attributes and relations, an introduction to RDF, Turtle, OWL, description logic and SPARQL, worked examples of inference, the steps of converting from EAD, and how much computer science the work requires. It is intended for students of archival science, for cataloguers, and for anyone building a digital archive or a linked open data service.
A note on the examples
The book was first written in Japanese, for readers in Japan. Where the original used Japanese records, institutions and legislation to make a point, the examples in this edition have been replaced rather than translated, so that they can be followed without knowledge of Japanese archival practice. What has not been changed is the vantage point: the author works in a country whose archival tradition was not represented in the group that drafted RiC, and the book says so plainly. Readers inside the traditions that were represented may find that observation useful.
Contents
- 1. What RiC Is --- the shape of the standard and the structure of the primary sources
- 2. From the World of ISAD(G) to RiC --- references and identifiers, XML, normalisation, neighbouring standards
- 3. What RiC Changed --- the new freedom and what it costs, provenance and custodial history
- 4. Reading RiC-CM --- entities, attributes, relations; reading ER diagrams and relation charts
- 5. RiC-O --- an introduction to RDF and OWL, description logic, serialisations
- 6. Inference --- six concrete situations and what the reasoner does
- 7. Putting It into Practice --- the conversion process, a worked example, retention and disposal, the toolbox
- 8. How Much Technology Do You Need?
- Appendices --- the entities of RiC-CM, frequently used RiC-O vocabulary, hints for the exercises, a glossary of words that shift meaning between fields, primary sources, and an index (with exercises at the end of each chapter)
Sample data
The examples in the book are also published as files you can load and run (ric-introduction-en-examples.zip, about 240 KB). It contains four Turtle datasets, the fourteen SPARQL queries that appear in the book, the SHACL shapes with data that violates them, and a script that checks the whole set. All data is fictional.
The RDF and CSV listings of RiC-O 1.1 are included, so inference and validation run as soon as
the archive is expanded. After pip install rdflib pyshacl owlrl, running
python3 check.py verifies the syntax of every Turtle file, that each vocabulary name
exists in RiC-O, that domains and ranges are respected, the number of rows each query returns, and
the contents of the SHACL report. The accompanying README.md explains how to run the
data under Apache Jena Fuseki and GraphDB.
It carries the same CC BY 4.0 licence as the book, so it may be adapted for teaching.
Editions
- English edition 1.0 (23 August 2026) · 124 pages
- First release. Translated and adapted from the Japanese edition 1.4.4.
Licence and citation
This book is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, adapt, translate, and use it in teaching or publication, provided that you give attribution. The RiC documents published by ICA EGAD, which are the primary sources for this book, are released under the same licence.
Tetsuji Kuboyama, Records in Contexts: An Introduction --- Understanding the New International Standard for Archival Description. English edition 1.0.2, 2026, CC BY 4.0.