ICARecords in Contexts is the International Council on Archives' new-generation standard for archival description, designed to replace and unify the four previous ICA descriptive standards: ISAD(G), ISAAR(CPF), ISDF, and ISDIAH. By linking records with the people, places, events, and activities that produced and used them, RiC enables a far more contextualized, flexible, and interconnected approach to archival description than its predecessors allowed.
Background
The ICA Expert Group on Archival Description (EGAD) was established in late 2012 with the mandate to develop a single successor standard to the existing four ICA descriptive standards. Work on RiC began in 2013. The first public draft of the conceptual model (RiC-CM 0.1) appeared in 2016, followed by successive iterations incorporating community feedback. Version 1.0 of the three core parts -- RiC-FAD, RiC-CM, and RiC-O -- was released in late 2023. Work on the ontology continued with minor releases culminating in RiC-O 1.1 in May 2025, and the fourth part, RiC-AG (Application Guidelines), reached version 0.1 in October 2025.
Purpose and Scope
RiC addresses the full scope of archival description through four complementary parts:
- RiC-FAD (Foundations of Archival Description) -- a concise statement of the foundational principles and purposes of archival description.
- RiC-CM (Conceptual Model) -- a high-level model that identifies and describes records, the people who created and used them, and the activities those records document and facilitate.
- RiC-O (Ontology) -- a formal OWL ontology implementing RiC-CM, enabling archival descriptions to be published as Linked Open Data with a vocabulary specific to archival practice.
- RiC-AG (Application Guidelines) -- concrete guidance and examples for practitioners and software developers implementing RiC-CM and RiC-O.
The standard is domain-specific to archives and records management but is designed to interoperate with broader Linked Data standards and other cultural heritage metadata frameworks.
Key Entity Types
RiC-CM defines a rich set of entity types and relations. The principal entities include:
| Entity | Description |
|---|---|
| Record Resource | An archival resource (fonds, series, file, item) |
| Instantiation | A physical or digital embodiment of a record resource |
| Agent | A person, group, or corporate body |
| Activity | An action or set of actions |
| Place | A geographic location |
| Date | A temporal entity |
| Rule | A regulation, convention, or standard governing records |
| Event | A notable occurrence |
Relations between entities capture provenance, custody, creation, use, and other archival relationships, supporting multi-dimensional navigation and discovery.
Serializations and Technical Formats
RiC-O is formally expressed in OWL and is available in standard RDF serializations including Turtle and RDF/XML. The canonical ontology IRI is https://www.ica.org/standards/RiC/ontology, which serves both a human-readable HTML representation and machine-readable content through content negotiation. All component documents are available on GitHub under the ICA-EGAD organization.
Governance and Maintenance
RiC is maintained by EGAD under the International Council on Archives. The standard follows an open development model: drafts are published for public comment, and all ontology and guidelines work is hosted on GitHub with open issue tracking. RiC-O is released under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 license. EGAD actively responds to community feedback through the RiC Discussion Group on Google Groups.
Notable Implementations
Several national archives and archival software projects have begun adopting RiC. The Archives nationales de France has been a prominent early implementer, developing tools and datasets based on RiC-O. The standard is also being explored by institutions in Spain, Switzerland, and other countries. Because RiC-O produces standard Linked Data, it can be integrated with existing SPARQL endpoints and knowledge graph infrastructures.
Related Standards
RiC supersedes four previous ICA standards: ISAD(G) for general description, ISAAR(CPF) for authority records, ISDF for functions, and ISDIAH for archival institutions. It is designed to be compatible with other Linked Data vocabularies and can complement standards such as Schema.org and PROV for provenance information.