  Archives are facing numerous challenges. On the one hand, archival assets are
evolving to encompass digitized documents and increasing quantities of
born-digital information in diverse formats. On the other hand, the audience is
changing along with how it wishes to access archival material. Moreover, the
interoperability requirements of cultural heritage repositories are growing. In
this context, the Portuguese Archives started an ambitious program aiming to
evolve its data model, migrate existing records, and build a new archival
management system appropriate to both archival tasks and public access. The
overall goal is to have a fine-grained and flexible description, more
machine-actionable than the current one. This work describes ArchOnto, a linked
open data model for archives, and rules for its automatic population from
existing records. ArchOnto adopts a semantic web approach and encompasses the
CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model and additional ontologies, envisioning
interoperability with datasets curated by multiple communities of practice.
Existing ISAD(G)-conforming descriptions are being migrated to the new model
using the direct mappings provided here. We used a sample of 25 records
associated with different description levels to validate the completeness and
conformity of ArchOnto to existing data. This work is in progress and is
original in several respects: (1) it is one of the first approaches to use
CIDOC CRM in the context of archives, identifying problems and questions that
emerged during the process and pinpointing possible solutions; (2) it addresses
the balance in the model between the migration of existing records and the
construction of new ones by archive professionals; and (3) it adopts an open
world view on linking archival data to global information sources.
