Abstract
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.
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Notes
For reasons of space, we do not include examples for this case. We provide examples only for the case of software, since this case is in general more challenging.
This paper elaborates on the ideas first presented in [32]. In comparison to that paper, the current paper presents a more expressive modeling approach (accounting for parameters and exceptions), shows how real emulators and converters can be modeled, provides implementation details, reports our experiences for implementing this approach using semantic web tools, presents the system Epimenides and reports results from its evaluation so far in the context of the ongoing APARSEN NoE.
Open Archival Information System (ISO 14721:2003).
KEEP has created an emulation framework [5] (EF) which provides additional services which will help to build a more solid ground for the emulation preservation strategy. KEEP is depending on existing and future emulators, and has not created an emulator itself.
In an implementation over Prolog, we could use the retract feature to delete a fact from the database.
Multipurpose internet mail extensions (MIME) is an internet standard that extends the format of email.
The experiments were carried out using the Virtuoso 06.01.3127 version, running in a DualCore linux machine with 3GB RAM.
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Acknowledgments
Work done in the context of NoE APARSEN (Alliance Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe, FP7, Proj. No 269977), and SCIDIP-ES (SCIence Data Infrastructure for Preservation—Earth Science, FP7, for an overview see [25]). Many thanks to Rene van Horik from DANS for his active participation, and to Anastasia Analyti for proofreading the paper.
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Appendix
Appendix
1.1 Appendix A: A screen dumps from Epimenides
Figure 14 shows the initial screen of the system, where the user can login for loading his personal or other profile. Figure 15 shows the first screen that allows the user to upload an atomic file or a zipped collection of files.
Load your personal profile or use a demo profile
Upload digital objects to check the performability of them
The system analyzes the contents of the zip file and for each of the included files it suggests a task. This is shown in Fig. 16.
System finds the tasks that usually make sense to apply to the uploaded digital objects
Figure 17 shows the results of this analysis. We can see that the first file is in red because the selected task, i.e. Rendenring, cannot be performed over that file digital object). In contrast, the selected tasks for the other two files can be performed, and for this reason they are marked with green.
Results of the analysis
The user can explore the dependencies for each one of the digital objects. For example Fig. 18 shows what happens if the user clicks to explore the dependencies of the “rendering” task. We can see all the rules of the selected task that are available in the system. The atoms of each rule are green or red. Green atoms are available in the profile of the user, while the red are not. Moreover, the user can click on an atom to explore the dependencies of this atom, so he can see the rules or the facts of this atom.
Explore dependencies of a task
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Tzitzikas, Y., Kargakis, Y. & Marketakis, Y. Assisting digital interoperability and preservation through advanced dependency reasoning. Int J Digit Libr 15, 103–127 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-014-0131-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-014-0131-1