Describes the current state. Live figures are on current status.
Workspace decisions and assumptions
OpenRiC Workspace is built in the open, and so are the choices behind it. This page lists them in two kinds. A decision was taken by Dr Johan Pieterse, who leads the project, and is recorded with its date. An assumption is a choice made while building, recorded where it was made, and still open to review: it holds until someone decides otherwise.
Each decision of design is written up in full as an architecture decision record (ADR) in the Workspace’s repository; the roadmap records the order of work. This page is the summary. Where the two differ, the repository is right and this page is out of date.
None of this binds the specification. The Workspace’s choices of database, sign-in or workflow never become requirements of OpenRiC; where building the Workspace showed a gap in the specification, it was raised as an issue on openric/spec instead.
Architecture decisions
| ADR | Date | Decision |
|---|---|---|
| 0001 | 19 Oct 2026 | An independent canonical store; RDF and search are projections of it |
| 0002 | 19 Oct 2026 | Laravel on PHP 8.3, with PostgreSQL 16 as the canonical store |
| 0003 | 19 Oct 2026 | Implementation starts before the Standard Acceptance Gate |
| 0004 | 19 Oct 2026 | A tamper-evident audit log, reusing Heratio’s hash chain |
| 0005 | 20 Oct 2026 | Roles and permissions after Heratio’s access control; a denial wins |
| 0006 | 20 Oct 2026 | A RiC-native entity model: Heratio is the floor, RiC the measure |
| 0007 | 26 Oct 2026 | API keys, and proposals that an archivist reviews |
| 0008 | 27 Oct 2026 | Rights and Local Contexts Labels as rules |
| 0009 | 27 Oct 2026 | Full-text search on PostgreSQL |
| 0010 | 29 Oct 2026 | Accessions as their own kind, exported as activities |
| 0011 | 30 Oct 2026 | Workflows and tasks as Heratio’s, with teams as roles |
| 0012 | 30 Oct 2026 | EAC-CPF and EAC-F exchange, round trips by IRI |
| 0013 | 30 Oct 2026 | The Portability and Governance profiles: RiC-O import, deprecated IRIs, the dataset and the SHACL gate |
| 0014 | 30 Oct 2026 | IIIF Presentation 3 from the record |
| 0015 | 31 Oct 2026 | Embargoes on records and their files; retention and disposal |
| 0016 | 31 Oct 2026 | Privacy and jurisdiction packs, POPIA governance first |
| 0017 | 31 Oct 2026 | Research services: all of Heratio’s ahg-research |
| 0018 | 2 Nov 2026 | Every relation in RiC-O, rules and mandates, and exchange without silent loss |
| 0019 | 2 Nov 2026 | Several parents, functions, and the last V0.1 profiles |
: Architecture decision records of OpenRiC Workspace
Decisions on scope and order
| Date | Decision |
|---|---|
| 19 Oct 2026 | Build the Workspace before the Standard Acceptance Gate, against a pinned, released specification version; it never counts as the independent implementation OpenRiC v1.0 needs (K-6). |
| 26 Oct 2026 | Bring parts of integration protocols and AI assistance with human review forward from V2.0, so the AHG Archives MCP can serve the Workspace. |
| 27 Oct 2026 | Park the Heratio migration check (phase 4) until a Heratio export carries a full sample. |
| 31 Oct 2026 | Take all of Heratio’s research services, not the reading room alone (ADR 0017). |
| 31 Oct 2026 | Every data field shows the RiC term it is kept or exported as, or says that RiC-O has none (ADR 0006, option C). |
| 1 Nov 2026 | Release the research services as far as they were built, and spend the next phase on hardening and acceptance after two external reviews. |
| 1 Nov 2026 | The backup restore drill comes last, but V0.1 is not signed off without it. |
| 1 Nov 2026 | Authority records not yet published stay readable to any signed-in account of the institution (ADR 0005). |
| 1 Nov 2026 | Up to and including V1.0 the Workspace covers archives only; other collecting domains may follow from V2.0, one at a time and on demand. |
| 2 Nov 2026 | Implement the Authority & Context, Graph Traversal, Digital Object Linkage and Provenance & Event profiles (ADR 0018, ADR 0019). |
| 2 Nov 2026 | A unit of description may be in several record sets at once (ADR 0019). |
| 2 Nov 2026 | The ISAD(G), ISAAR(CPF) and ISDIAH screens stay, labelled as compatibility views beside the RiC-native ones. |
| 2 Nov 2026 | Raise seven gaps found while implementing as issues on the specification (openric/spec #67 to #73). |
| 2 Nov 2026 | The V0.1 acceptance walkthrough is run with archivists by Dr Johan Pieterse himself. |
| 2 Nov 2026 | The order of work after V0.1’s profiles: the parked research services, records management, the jurisdiction packs, the remaining Heratio services; then monitoring, preservation connectors, federation and publishing; AI and the restore drill last. The offline catalogue and other GLAM domains stay parked. |
: Decisions on the Workspace’s scope and the order of its work
Assumptions open to review
These were chosen while building, because a choice had to be made and nobody had yet made it. Each is recorded where it was made, and each can be changed.
| Made | Assumption | Recorded in |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Nov 2026 | A RiC bridge from a research project to the catalogue is a deliberate act, for public projects only, by someone who may create authority records; Heratio does it for every project automatically. | ADR 0017 |
| 1 Nov 2026 | The contradiction engine’s shared-source rule is fixed; Heratio’s mismatch between “opposes” and “refutes” had disabled it. | ADR 0017 |
| 1 Nov 2026 | IIIF canvases for sound or video without a known duration are left out of a manifest, and the tests check manifests without the IIIF schema, which carries no licence. | ADR 0014 |
| 2 Nov 2026 | A reference to another entity carries that entity’s names, language-tagged as in its own description, so a merged graph holds one title per entity. | ADR 0019 |
| 2 Nov 2026 | Activities published before v0.0.98 without a date stay published; the date is asked for the next time one is published. | ADR 0019 |
| 2 Nov 2026 | A DOI is registered only for a public project, since registering publishes it; it resolves to a landing page in the Workspace, not to a share link. | ADR 0017 |
| 2 Nov 2026 | A replication pack states no licence: that is the researcher’s to choose. | ADR 0017 |
| 2 Nov 2026 | Published lectures and training courses are open to every signed-in account of the institution, including one with no role. | ADR 0017 |
| 2 Nov 2026 | Rights policies for researchers guard a record’s files in the public catalogue, not its page, and never bind who may change the record. | ADR 0017 |
| 2 Nov 2026 | Heratio’s offline sync waits for the offline catalogue, which is parked. | ADR 0017 |
: Assumptions made while building the Workspace, open to review
What the Workspace keeps that RiC-O has no term for
RiC-O describes records and their contexts. An archive also runs an office: it takes in accessions, signs agreements with donors, keeps a reading room, routes work, registers how it processes personal information. The Workspace does that work as Heratio and AtoM do it, so it keeps values that RiC-O has no term for. It says so rather than hide it: each such value is a term of one of the Workspace’s own vocabularies, and the term’s scope note begins “Not a RiC-O term” and says where it is kept and why. Every data form shows, field by field, the RiC-O term a value is kept or exported as, or that there is none (ADR 0006, option C).
As of v0.0.99, 1,222 terms in 222 of the Workspace’s 284 vocabularies are of this kind:
| Area | Vocabularies | Terms | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Research services | 114 | 579 | A researcher’s own working data (projects, funding, plans, studios), not catalogue description; kept as Heratio’s ahg-research keeps it (ADR 0017) |
| Accessions | 24 | 134 | The intake, appraisal, valuation, containers and rights of an accession, as AtoM, PSIS and Heratio keep them; some are given in the CAAIS export (ADR 0010) |
| Privacy (POPIA) | 19 | 93 | Information Officers, the processing register and screening, as Heratio’s ahg-privacy keeps them (ADR 0016) |
| Reading room | 18 | 92 | Registration, rooms, seats, bookings and retrieval, as Heratio keeps them (ADR 0017) |
| Donor agreements | 10 | 89 | The agreement’s rights, restrictions and documents, as Heratio keeps them; the agreement itself is a rico:Record (ADR 0010) |
| Provenance and custody | 9 | 73 | The overview and steps of a record’s provenance; each step is exported as a rico:Activity, its working values are not |
| Workflow | 11 | 71 | Workflows, tasks and service levels, as Heratio and PSIS keep them (ADR 0011) |
| Retention and disposal | 5 | 23 | Schedules, classes and disposal actions, as Heratio’s ahg-records-manage keeps them (ADR 0015) |
| IIIF | 4 | 19 | IIIF Presentation 3 behaviours and resource types, and the checks of a manifest (ADR 0014) |
| Embargoes | 2 | 13 | The types and reasons of an embargo, as Heratio’s ahg-extended-rights keeps them (ADR 0015) |
| Community protocols | 1 | 10 | A community’s protocol on a description, kept and not exported (ADR 0008) |
| Research rights policies | 2 | 9 | ODRL 2.2 rule types and actions (ADR 0017) |
| Agent handling conditions | 1 | 7 | How an agent’s description is to be handled, as Heratio keeps it; not exported |
| Display layouts | 1 | 5 | Which compatibility view shows a description; not exported (ADR 0019) |
| Reports | 1 | 5 | The institution’s reports, as Heratio’s ahg-reports keeps them |
: Terms the Workspace keeps that RiC-O has no term for, by area
Every vocabulary, with its scope notes, is in the Workspace’s repository under resources/vocabularies, and each resolves at its own address, such as workspace.openric.org/vocab/permission. Where a gap seemed to belong in RiC-O or OpenRiC rather than in the Workspace, it was raised as an issue instead of kept quietly: on openric/spec for the specification, and, through it, for RiC-O itself.
To question a decision or an assumption, open an issue on openric/workspace, or use Ask a question.