Semantic and Other Serializations of Archival Description: Impact on the Understanding, Processing, and Use of Archival Materials

Archival science is a branch of information sciences that focuses on the information contained in archival materials, the materials themselves as a form of this information, and the metadata inscribed in finding aids. Archival description is a crucial responsibility of archivists. This responsibility depends on descriptive standards to guarantee global understanding among them. The framework was established in the 1990s and 2000s with the General International Standard Archival Description - ISAD(G), related standards, and software-readable finding aids in XML serialization. The most recent standard, Records in Contexts (RiC), is based on Semantic Web concepts, enabling more interoperable machine processing through a shared ontology. It also facilitates automated reasoning and new uses that may not need to be anticipated by archivists creating descriptions. RiC depends on serializing archival descriptions in RDF/XML and Turtle. The author of this paper explores the creation and validation of XML, Turtle, and Notation3 serializations for archival purposes, focusing on their features, ease of machine processing, readability, and suitability for formulating queries and extracting information from archival materials. The author concludes by discussing the implications of different serializations of descriptions and recommends enhancing RiC's reasoning capabilities to support a broader range of archival information applications.