A semi-automated digital preservation system based on semantic web services

Abstract

This paper describes a Web-services-based system which we have developed to enable organizations to semi-automatically preserve their digital collections by dynamically discovering and invoking the most appropriate preservation service, as it is required. By periodically comparing preservation metadata for digital objects in a collection with a software version registry, potential object obsolescence can be detected and a notification message sent to the relevant agent. By making preservation software modules available as Web services and describing them semantically using a machine-processable ontology (OWL-S), the most appropriate preservation service(s) for each object can then be automatically discovered, composed and invoked by software agents (with optional human input at critical decisionmaking steps). We believe that this approach represents a significant advance towards providing a viable, cost-effective solution to the long term preservation of large-scale collections of digital objects.

“What is a good digital library?” – A quality model for digital libraries

“…A complete formalization of context is out of the scope of this work. The reader is referred to a workshop on "Context in Information Retrieval" for a number of papers on the subject (Ingwersen et al, 2004). Also, we define, for future reference, two time dependent sub-communities of actors, users and external-judges ⊂ Ac, as:…”

“…Let us consider the following scenario adapted from (Hunter & Choudhury, 2004). In 2004, a librarian receives an email notifying her that a special collection 11 of 1,000 digital images, stored in TIFF version 5.0, is in danger of becoming obsolete, due to the fact that the latest version of the display software no longer supports TIFF 5.0.…”

“…In 2004, a librarian receives an email notifying her that a special collection 11 of 1,000 digital images, stored in TIFF version 5.0, is in danger of becoming obsolete, due to the fact that the latest version of the display software no longer supports TIFF 5.0. The librarian decides to migrate all digital photos to JPEG 2000, which now has become the de facto image preservation standard, recommended by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) (Hunter & Choudhury, 2004).…”

Using timed-release cryptography to mitigate the preservation risk of embargo periods

“…A manager can specify the attributes of the required preservation service on an object. Using Semantic Web services, a Discovery Agent can then be dynamically deployed to find migration or emulation preservation strategies from the pool of available services by comparing the attributes specified [26,25]. Further human intervention is required to select and invoke the most appropriate preservation service from a list of recommendations collected.…”

Preserving Interactive Multimedia Art: A Case Study in Preservation Planning

“…In the field of computer science, the most notable work has been carried out in the PANIC project [11,10] which developed preservation strategies for multimedia objects [9]. However, they focus on dealing with composite objects that contain different content; interaction is not covered.…”