Abstract

A rising expectation is seen in the description of archives contexts in a digital environment. The International Council on Archives Expert Group on Archival Description (ICA EGAD) released Records in Contexts-Ontology (RiC-O) v0.1 in December 2019. This study aims to analyze the characteristics of RiC-O and identify its benefits and considerations. As a result, RiC-O consists of 98 classes, 60 datatype properties, and 389 object properties, allowing all entities, attributes, and relations in the Records in Contexts-Conceptual Model (RiC-CM) v0.2 (preview) to define them in more detail. According to the case application result, RiC-O had the advantage of expressing predecessor relations between records and describing the agent in detail. In addition, it was possible to describe the “instantiation.” For the active use of RiC-O, several examples and detailed manuals must be provided in the next version to be developed, and prioritizing the accurate analysis of records, arrangement of relations between RiC-O components, and description of faithful metadata is indispensable.