| Abstract |
Modern society and economy is increasingly dependent on a deluge of only digitally available information, therefore its preservation eithin an unstable and rapidly evolving technological (and social) environment is a challanging problem of prominent importance. The contributions of this thesis revolve around three main topics:
(a) Intelligibility. As it is hard to define explicitly what information or what knowledge is, it is therefore very difficult to claim that a particular approach, methodology or technique can indeed preserve information and knowledge. To tackle this issue and for preserving the meaning of digital objects, we formalized tha notion of intelligibility in a OAIS-compliant manner and provided guidelines, methodologies and components that can aid humans in preserving information and knowledge. Specifically we formalized the notion of intelligibility and intelligibility gap throygh the norion of dependency. This perspective allows answering questions of the form: (a) what kind of (and how much) represenatation information do we need, (b) how this depends on the designated community, (c) what kind of automation could we offer (regarding packaging and dessemination). Apart drom developing formal and conceptual models, we developed RDF/s ontologies and tools (GapManager) and applied them in real data in the context of the CASPAR project.
(b) Provenance Modeling and Querying. There is a need for a comprehensive and extensible conceptual framework to integrate, exchande and exploit provenance information within or across digital archives. We extended the ISO standard CIDOC CRM, defining CIDOC CRM Digital, to explicitly model digital objects and showed how it can be employed for expressing and querying provenance information.
(c) Automating the Ingestion and Transformation of Metadata. Most of the preservation approaches rely on metadata. However the creation and maintanance of metadata is a laborious task that does not always pay off immediately. There is a need for tools that automate as much as possible the creation and curation of preservation metadata. We developed PreScan, a tool for automating the ingestion phase. It can bind together automatically extracted embedded metadata with manually provided metadata. It also supports processes for ensuring the freshness of the metadata repository and transforms metadata according to CIDOC CRM Digital.
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Conceptual modeling and tools for digital preservation
