Assisting digital interoperability and preservation through advanced dependency reasoning
Digital material has to be preserved not only against loss or corruption, but also against changes in its ecosystem. A quite general view of the digital preservation problem is to approach it from a dependency management point of view. In this paper, we present a rule-based approach for dependency management which can model also converters and emulators. We show that this modeling approach enables the automatic reasoning needed for reducing the human effort required for checking (and monitoring) whether a task on a digital object is performable. We provide examples demonstrating how real-world converters and emulators can be modeled, and show how the preservation services can be implemented. Subsequently, we detail an implementation based on semantic web technologies, describe the prototype system Epimenides which demonstrates the feasibility of the approach, and finally report various promising evaluation results.
digital preservation converters emulators semantic archives automatic reasoning for digital preservation