Provenance and Description History

Provenance in RiC

RiC-CM treats descriptions as Records in their own right. Every description has its own creation date, creator, and provenance chain. OpenRiC and Heratio implement this principle through:

RDF-Star Provenance

Every triple change is annotated with who made it, when, and why:

<< :record001 rico:hasCreationDate "1942-03-15" >>
    rico:wasAttributedTo :archivist-jane ;
    dcterms:created "2026-01-15"^^xsd:date ;
    rdfs:comment "Inferred from postmark" .

This reflects the RiC-CM Section 6 principle that descriptions are themselves Records.

Activity Model

Provenance activities are modelled as first-class entities:

• Creation
• Accumulation
• Transfer
• Management
• Digitisation
• Preservation
• Description
• Review

Each activity links to the records it affected, the agents who participated, and the dates it occurred.

Audit Trail

In addition to RDF-Star annotations, Heratio maintains a PostgreSQL audit log with:

• Old and new values for every change
• User attribution
• Timestamps
• Entity history views combining both RDF-Star and audit log timelines

Certainty Annotations

Relationships can carry certainty and confidence annotations via RDF-Star, allowing archivists to express the reliability of attributions and connections.