Describes the current state. Live figures are on current status.
About OpenRiC
OpenRiC is an open contract for publishing and exchanging Records in Contexts data. Any archival system can implement it; no system is privileged by it. The specification is CC-BY 4.0 and the reference code is AGPL-3.0.
The comparison that explains it fastest is IIIF. IIIF did not tell anyone how to store images - it agreed on how to ask for them, and the tooling followed. OpenRiC does that for archival description and its context.
What adopting this commits you to, what it does not, and what is production versus draft. Non-technical.
Read the brief →Who decides, how a change is proposed and accepted, the compatibility policy, and what has to be true before v1.0.
How decisions get made →The exact RiC versions targeted, the rule against minting terms in the RiC-O namespace, and how upstream is tracked.
See the baseline →What OpenRiC does not replace
Worth stating plainly, because an access contract is easy to mistake for a land grab.
- IIIF owns presentation and delivery of digital representations. OpenRiC links to a Manifest; it does not reimplement one.
- Linked Art and CIDOC CRM own museum and cultural-object semantics. Where they overlap with RiC the answer is a documented mapping, not forcing foreign semantics into RiC-O.
- Wikidata owns shared external identity. OpenRiC reconciles against it rather than competing with it.
- The standards you already run. ISAD(G), ISAAR(CPF), ISDF and ISDIAH description maps forward; it does not have to be rewritten first.
- Your catalogue. OpenRiC is a contract over data, not a system to migrate into.
Honest state of things
One reference implementation, live, running on the database of the Heratio archival platform. Heratio, from the same maintainers, reads from it; an independent implementation is still to come. 12 profiles defined, 7 of them normative. A conformance probe, a validator, JSON Schemas, SHACL shapes and a fixture pack.
What is missing is the thing that matters most for a standard: a second independent implementation, and an external institution committing to deploy. Those are explicit gates on v1.0 rather than aspirations, and they are written into governance. The drift log records where the reference service currently lags the specification, including the parts that are awkward to admit.
Related work
Other RiC implementations, the ICA-EGAD tooling OpenRiC tracks, and the upstream proposals filed from this project are on related implementations. Contributions made back to RiC-O - on agent roles in relations, language on relations, SHACL and a PROF profile - are linked from there too.
Get in touch
Questions about the spec, the API, conformance or modelling go to Ask a question, which reaches the maintainers directly. Anything that belongs in the open goes to the specification repository.
Maintained by Dr Johan Pieterse, The Archive and Heritage Digital Commons Group, South Africa.