The RiC-O converter tool has been released in its v3.0 version.
(continuation of a serie of posts on the usage of knowledge graphs by archival institutions). The announcement was posted on the RiC-O users mailing-list. I am pleased to collaborate with Florence Clavaud that leads the lab of the Archives Nationales de France on this project. Florence is also the main editor of RiC-O.
What is RiC-O converter ? a tool to help archival institutions transition from their XML and document-based data (EAD and EAC files), to graph-based RDF datasets expressed on the Records In Contexts ontology. This is a double-shift : a shift to a different data structure (graphs, decentralized) but also and more importantly a shift to a different conceptual model (RiC-CM) : new kinds of entities to describe archival descriptions, leading to more precise and interoperable descriptions. Typically we are talking here about RecordResources, Instantiations, Relations, etc. In particular, v3.0.0 of the converter produces data that conforms to RiC-O 1.1.
Two things make this transition to graph-based + conceptual-model-backed descriptions in the archival domain unique :
- they provide a ready-to-use OWL encoding of the conceptual model (RiC-O encodes RiC-CM). This was not the case for FRBR, nor for CIDOC-CRM (only since a few months can we download OWL encoding of the CIDOC-CRM from the website). So archival institutions have everything they need to start encoding.
- they provide a tool to convert existing data ! and that is RiC-O converter. So archival institutions can adpat it to their own need.
Check out the online documentation of RiC-O converter if you want to try it out on your own EAD or EAC files, and let us know what you think of it.
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