Accomplishing Bit Preservation! Representation Information!! Provenance and Context Content Standards!!!
Naresh Kumar, CNR- ISTI, Pisa
Preservation e-Infrastructure Interest Group
A another wonderful gathering of 474 brilliants working with data at third plenary of Research Data Alliance came up with fruitful discussions during 26 - 28 march 2014 at Dublin, Ireland. The RDA organisation is enjoying the privilege of performing inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary research on data by some of the best professionals from all over the world. Having a trend to work in working groups and interest groups, RDA members are trying to address big issues by fragmenting them.
One such group is the Preservation e-Infrastructure Interest Group that took two sessions to discuss different issues. This group is dealing with Issues related to the infrastructure setup for preservation of digital objects. Members of the interest group (IG) believe that the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model is a good base for any infrastructure for preservation. Now IG works for further build up on the OAIS reference model to set need oriented appropriate infrastructures for preservation. In this direction, a Bit Preservation working group proposed by Jamie Shiers is bit to bit storage is to be achieved. IG thinks that storage server provider sites have enough experience to contribute in solving this issue. Now an international infrastructure is required and for this standard interfaces with running code along with functionality, reliability and cost related to it needs to be defined. For federation issues, federation of single sites will be needed. To deal with the organizational and technical issues IG will define standards. The concerns of Reagan Moore about access control will be associated with minimal metadata.
To build up the OAIS Archival Information Package (AIP) logical structure which is concerned with usability particularly Representation Information is addressed by David Giaretta. The aim here is to focus on the things we need when things change, in order to ensure that the digitally encoded information continues to be understandable and usable by the Designated Community. When things change we need to:
o Know something has changed
o Identify the implications of that change
o Decide on the best course of action for preservation
o Define what RepInfo we need to fill the gaps
o Created by someone else or creating a new one
o If transformed: how to maintain data authenticity
o Alternatively: hand it over to another repository
o Make sure data continues to be usable
So the basic urge of the IG is to ensure all available tools can work together.
In the same direction to build up on OAIS reference model, Provenance and Context Content Standards is expressed by Ruth Duerr. The OAIS reference model describes the categories of information that needs to be kept along with the data but doesn't provide specific information. So to contribute to solve the above issue the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) through its research came up with this detailed list:
o content name,
o a more detailed definition and description,
o an indication of why the item needs to be preserved,
o criteria describing how good the content should be,
o priority for preservation of the item,
So based on this a Case description was made as followed
o Collect a list of provenance and context information together
o Disseminate that information.
The preservation e-infrastructure interest group is dedicated to achieve above mentioned targets for the benefit of designated community. More information related to it can also found on Preservation e-Infrastructure IG wiki page available on RDA website.
