Description Provenance in OpenRiC

The RiC-CM Approach

Per RiC-CM 1.0 Section 6 (Documenting Description) and guidance from Florence Clavaud (chair of ICA/EGAD, lead of RiC-O development team), OpenRiC implements a dual provenance model.

Key Principles

1. rico:hasCreationDate is a property of the described resource (the Record, Instantiation, etc.), not of the RDF description itself. It models when the archival object was created.

2. Descriptions are Records — RiC treats archival descriptions as Records themselves. A finding aid is a rico:Record connected to the described entity via rico:describesOrDescribed, with rico:hasDocumentaryFormType set to FindingAid or AuthorityRecord.

3. RDF-Star provides lightweight triple-level provenance annotations (who changed what, when, why).

OpenRiC's Dual Model

1. RDF-Star Annotations (per-triple)

Every write operation annotates each triple:

<< :record001 rico:title "Vitet Papers" >>
    openric:modifiedBy <https://ric.theahg.co.za/user/archivist-uuid> ;
    openric:modifiedAt "2026-03-28T10:00:00"^^xsd:dateTime ;
    openric:changeReason "Initial cataloguing" .

2. Description-as-Record (per-entity)

Following the National Archives of France pattern:

<https://ric.theahg.co.za/entity/record/desc-uuid> a rico:Record ;
    rico:hasDocumentaryFormType ricdft:FindingAid ;
    rico:title "Finding aid for Vitet Papers" ;
    rico:describesOrDescribed <https://ric.theahg.co.za/entity/record-set/vitet-uuid> ;
    rico:hasCreationDate "2026-03-28"^^xsd:date ;
    rico:hasOrHadCreator <https://ric.theahg.co.za/user/archivist-uuid> .

References

• RiC-CM 1.0, Section 6: Documenting Description (pp. 125-129)
• RiC-AG FAQ on description examples
• National Archives of France RiC-O examples
• Records in Contexts users Google Group discussion, March 2026