Explore
Three kinds of thing live under OpenRiC, and they are for different people. Public discovery needs no account and no key. The archivist workspace is planned. Developer tools are for people building or testing an implementation.
If you would rather be shown than go wandering, OpenRiC in five minutes follows a single object all the way through - catalogue record, the activities and laws around it, a 3D file, and a machine-readable export.
Public discovery
Read-only. Nothing here can change the data.
A catalogue view of the reference service's data - records, the people and organisations behind them, activities, places, rules and physical or digital versions. Search it, filter by type, open anything.
Open Browse →The same data as a picture. Start at a record and walk outwards to its creator, the activity that produced it, where it happened and when - the connections archival description usually leaves implicit.
Open the Graph Explorer ↗What is running and what is still draft, with each example labelled as real, derived or synthetic demonstration data.
Read the proof →Archivist workspace - planned
Describing, arranging, reviewing and publishing records will happen in OpenRiC Workspace, an application in development. It does not exist yet. Until it does, archivists can try modelling with the modelling wizard, which shows the RiC requests a description would produce without saving anything to the public service.
Developer tools
For implementers and testers. These need a server address, and some need an API key with write scope.
- The API explorer lists every endpoint and lets you try it.
- The capture client creates and edits records on a server you have a key for.
- The conformance probe tests a server against a profile.
- Browse and the graph explorer can point at any conformant server; the server setting sits under Developer tools in Browse and Advanced in the viewer.
What you are looking at
Demonstration dataset. Some records and relationships in the reference service are synthetic, derived or machine-generated. They show how OpenRiC behaves and must not be cited as an institution's catalogue without checking their source.
The reference service reads the database of Heratio, the maintainers’ archival platform. Much of what is there is demonstration and test material, and it is not a curated showcase, so expect some messy records. Where a page uses a record as evidence, it labels what kind of record it is.
If you want to understand why the data is shaped the way it is, that is the model. If you want to publish your own this way, see Developers.
If you are running your own implementation and want it listed, open a discussion on the specification repository.