Dependency management for digital preservation using semantic web technologies

Abstract

The preservation of digital objects is a topic of prominent importance for archives and digital libraries. In this article, we focus on the problem of preserving the intelligibility of digital objects.We formalize the problem in terms of dependencies and specify a number of basic intelligibilityrelated tasks. In parallel, we introduce a preservation scenario as a means for clarifying the pros and cons of various representation and modeling languages that are used for the problem at hand, which reveals the benefits of adopting Semantic Web (SW) languages as a representation framework. To this end, we propose a minimal core ontology for representing intelligibility-related dependencies along with methodological hints for extending it. Finally, we report empirical and experimental results from applying the proposed approach on real data sets. It is worth mentioning that this approach can be used not only on SW-based repositories or archives, but also on those that are based on conventional approaches and languages (like EAST, DEDSL, XFDU/SAFE).