RKMS Schemes

RKMS Category Type Scheme
RKMS Entity Relationship Scheme
RKMS Extension for ISO8601
RKMS Business-Recordkeeping Functions and Activities Scheme

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RKMS Schemes

RKMS Category Type Scheme
RKMS Entity Relationship Scheme
RKMS Extension for ISO8601
RKMS Business-Recordkeeping Functions and Activities Scheme

RKMS Category Type Scheme
The RKMS Category Type Scheme is a vocabulary of terms used in two places in the RKMS. It is primarily used by the "Category Type" element to indicate the level of aggregation of the entity being described. The values used within the Category Type element are taken directly from the tables below.

The RKMS Category Type Scheme is also used within the "Type" value component of the "Relation" element to indicate the level of aggregation of the entities being related. In this case, two values are used. The first value indicates the category type of the current entity. The second value indicates the category type of the entity being referenced. These values are separated by a slash (-). For example, the relation between a business activity and the records associated with that activity would be described as:

RKMS.Business.Relation = RelatedTo: RECORD001; Type: Business Activity - Record Aggregation

The taxonomy of aggregation layers has been defined with reference to the Records Continuum Model. 1
For the Business entity class these layers are:

 

RKMS Category Type	Definition
Business Transaction	Acts, actions, decisions, communications or the component parts of business processes.
Business Activity	The social or organisational activities which organisations and people undertake in performing their functions.
Business Function	Major units of mandated activity performed by organisations or people in pursuance of their purposes.
Ambient Function	The broader societal purposes fulfilled by functions.

The Business Recordkeeping entity class is conceptually a sub-set of the Business entity class. It has been broken out and specified separately because it represents the social and organisational activities that are concerned with recording, managing and enabling the use of records of other types of social and organisational activity. The layers of aggregation for this entity are:

 

RKMS Category Type	Definition
Business-Recordkeeping Transaction	Recordkeeping acts, actions, decisions, communications or the component parts of recordkeeping processes.
Business-Recordkeeping Activity	The social or organisational activities which organisations and people undertake in performing recordkeeping functions.
Business-Recordkeeping Function	Major units of mandated activity performed by organisations or people in pursuance of recordkeeping purposes.
Business-Recordkeeping Ambient Function	The broader societal purposes the recordkeeping functions fulfil.

Agents may be corporate bodies, persons or instruments. They may operate at any level in a hierarchy and may be responsible for creating, controlling and managing records, or they may be involved in their use. Examples include intelligent agents, operational positions, organisational units or work groups, organisations, social institutions (including social constructs such as motherhood or friendship), persons or families. The layers defined in this entity are:

 

RKMS Category Type	Definition
Person / Actor	Actors who carry out the transactions.
Organisational Unit / Work Group	Groups responsible for the activity.
Organisation / Corporate Body	Organisations mandated to carry out the function.
Social Institution	Institutions associated with ambient functions in the sense of high level societal purposes.

The Records entity class encompasses records at any layer of aggregation or disaggregation. The layers defined are:

 

RKMS Category Type	Definition
Record Object	AS4390 (Australian Standard: Records Management)2 defines a Record as: recorded information, in any form, including data in computer systems, created or received and maintained by an organization or person in the transaction of business or the conduct of affairs and kept as evidence of such activity. RKMS defines a Record Object as the smallest unit of recorded information controlled by the recordkeeping system. A record object may be a whole record, or a component of a record.
Record Aggregation	Any organic grouping of records, series, files, or items.
Corporate Archive / Recordkeeping System	The whole of the records of an organisation, or the corporate recordkeeping system.
Collective Archives	All of the records within a specified society, jurisdiction, business or social sector brought into an encompassing framework to form collective memory.

RKMS Entity Relationship Scheme
Under development.

RKMS Extension for ISO8601
ISO 86013 is an international standard for the representation of dates and times. The RKMS Schema extends this standard for two reasons:

• to reduce the number of possible date and time formats, and
• to allow open-ended date ranges.

Restricted Date and Time Formats
ISO 8601 describes a wider range of date and time formats than would normally be needed to describe recordkeeping entities. Both software and humans can find this variety of date formats difficult to recognise. For this reason, the RKMS Extension for ISO8601 defines a limited range of date formats likely to meet most recordkeeping requirements.

The RKMS Extension to ISO 8601 adopts the restricted set of date formats specified in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Note on Date and Time Formats (http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime). This note aims to simplify use of dates on the World Wide Web. All of the date formats specified in the note are valid ISO 8601 dates.

In summary, the W3C note allows dates to be represented as:

Year:

CCYY (e.g. 1999)

Year and Month:

CCYY-MM (e.g. 1999-07)

Year and Month and Day:

CCYY-MM-DD (e.g. 1999-07-01)

Year and Month and Day and Hours and Minutes plus Time Zone offset:

CCYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD (e.g. 1999-07-01T19:30+10:00)

Year and Month and Day and Hours and Minutes and Seconds plus Time Zone offset:

CCYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD (e.g. 1999-07-01T19:30:45+10:00)

where

CCYY is a two digit century followed by a two digit year

MM is a two-digit month (01 is January, 02 February, and so on)

DD is a two digit day of the month (01 through to 31)

hh is a two digit hour (00 through to 23)

mm is a two digit minute (00 through to 59)

ss is a two digit second (00 through to 59)

TZD is a time zone designator (+hh:mm or -hh:mm)

Open Date Ranges
Some recordkeeping metadata requires specification of date ranges. For example, a Business Activity may only have been valid between the years 1949 and 1953. ISO 8601 allows the specification of date ranges using a forward slash (/) to separate dates representing the start and end of the range. For example, "1949/1953".

Recordkeeping metadata also requires specification of open date ranges. For example, an Agency may have an operational period from July 1st 1998 until the present date. Open date ranges such as this are not defined in ISO 8601. The RKMS Extension to ISO 8601 allows open date ranges to be specified by extending the ISO 8601 syntax to allow the omission of either the start or end date in the range. Acceptable RKMS date ranges are then:

Closed date range:

DateTime/DateTime (e.g. 1949/1953-01-01)

Date range with unknown start:

/DateTime (e.g. /2000-12-31T11:59:59)

Date range with no end date:

DateTime/ (e.g. 1998-07-01/)

RKMS Business-Recordkeeping Functions and Activities Scheme
The RKMS Business-Recordkeeping Functions and Activities Scheme is a vocabulary of terms used in three places in the RKMS. It is used primarily by the Records entities within the "Event Type" value component of the "Event History" element as the mandatory scheme for the data values.

This scheme can also used in Business-Recordkeeping entities to qualify the whole value of the "Identifier" and "Title" elements. It can qualify both the whole value of the "Functional Classification" element and the values of its Descriptor(s), ID and Description value components.

In addition, the RKMS Business-Recordkeeping Functions and Activities Scheme has been used to define and structure the element qualifiers in the Records entities unique elements "Appraisal" through to "Use".

The RKMS Business-Recordkeeping Functions and Activities Scheme is an embryonic scheme currently under further development. It is anticipated that it will change considerably once developed further.

 

Business-Recordkeeping Function	Business-Recordkeeping Activity
Appraisal	Recordkeeping Requirement Disposal Sentencing Destruction Retention Transfer
Control	Registration Classification Indexing Context Description Custody Metadata Management Arrangement
Preservation	Storage Refreshment Migration Conservation
Retrieval	Rendering Representation Transmission
Access	Rights Restrictions Permissions Conditions

Endnotes
1 The Business entity class comprises entities represented on the Transactional Axis of the Model, the Agent entity class those on the Identity Axis, and the Records entity class those on the Recordkeeping Axis. For more information, see Frank Upward, "Structuring the Records Continuum Part One: Post-custodial Principles and Properties", Archives and Manuscripts. 24, no. 2`(Nov 1996): 268-285, and "Structuring the Records Continuum Part Two: Structuration Theory and Recordkeeping", Archives and Manuscripts 25, no. 1 (May 1997): 10-35.
2 Standards Australia, AS4390-1996, Australian Standard: Records Management. For details of availability see http://www.standards.org.au/
3 ISO 8601 : 1988 (E), "Data elements and interchange formats - Information interchanges - Representation of dates and times"

 

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