What OpenRiC Is

What OpenRiC Is

OpenRiC is the open RiC-native semantic framework, documentation, and interoperability initiative maintained by The Archive and Heritage Group. It centralises implementation guidance, tooling, mappings, and community collaboration for Records in Contexts (RiC).

OpenRiC is not a standalone competing platform. It is the RiC-native capability layer that powers contextual features within Heratio, the operational archival and GLAM platform — and supports standalone semantic use cases where needed.

The Relationship

Users should not experience Heratio and OpenRiC as competing systems. They should experience:

• Heratio for traditional archival description, hierarchy, workflow, editing, and operational work
• RiC capabilities (powered by OpenRiC) for contextual traversal, entity relationships, linked-data understanding, and graph-based discovery

Both operate over the same permissions, identifiers, services, and content.

What OpenRiC Provides

• RiC-CM / RiC-O implementation guidance
• Graph explorer and contextual visualisation (integrated into Heratio)
• SPARQL access and semantic query examples
• JSON-LD / RDF outputs
• Mappings from archival standards and legacy schemas to RiC
• Linked-data and triplestore integration guidance
• SHACL and semantic validation patterns
• Examples of traditional view vs RiC view rendering
• Reusable semantic services and integration approaches
• Sample datasets, examples, and reference architectures

Who Is OpenRiC For?

For institutions

Lead with Heratio as the operational platform. OpenRiC is the RiC-native capability layer powering contextual and interoperability features.

For developers and standards communities

Lead with OpenRiC. It shows how RiC can support or integrate with operational archival platforms.

For research and experimentation

OpenRiC is the home for graph-first demonstrations, mappings, semantic validation, and linked-data workflows.

Strategic Position

• Heratio remains the primary operational platform
• RiC becomes a first-class equal mode inside Heratio, not a hidden add-on
• OpenRiC centralises the public RiC narrative, framework, and ecosystem
• Reusable architecture, tooling, documentation, and mapping artifacts are published under OpenRiC

OpenRiC centralises the RiC-native story. Heratio delivers the operational archival experience.