The modelling wizard

The modelling wizard (openric.org/wizard) teaches RiC by doing. See also Modelling with the wizard in The model.

What you get per step

• a prompt (a real decision),
• choices with why each fits or doesn’t,
• a capture - the actual API call, every field editable, run live,
• branching - different valid paths based on your answer.

Two ways to use it

1. Pick a scenario - 21 worked examples. Eighteen are organised by material (magnetic tape, photographs, maps, oral history, registers, newspapers, family papers, email, web archives, …); three by modelling problem instead, and those apply whatever you hold - an unknown creator, a chain of custody, a closed record. Each is a citable, branching walkthrough.
2. Describe your own material - type a sentence; an AI proposes a model. Every entity code and relation is validated against RiC-CM 1.0 before display, so it never shows an invalid model. It proposes; you review it. (≈30s while it generates.)

Live creation

The wizard shows, for every step, the exact requests that would create the records. Since 14 October 2026 it no longer sends them to the public reference service (ric.theahg.co.za): anonymous saving there was switched off, because entities created that way were written into a production database rather than an isolated sandbox. Use Copy the requests to keep your model, or set the server field to your own OpenRiC server and the wizard will create the records there.

Accuracy

Scenarios are validated in CI (bin/validate-scenarios.mjs) for structure, branch integrity, valid relation codes, and entity-code↔label consistency - the same check that keeps “Place = RiC-E22” honest.

Next

• The RiC entities & relations
• Creating entities - the API behind the captures