Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
There are a wide variety of approaches to describing, modelling and tracking
provenance; a full survey is beyond the scope of this document. Related work
includes (amongst many others) the Open Provenance Model [
124
], CIDOC-CRM,
PREMIS [
139
] and the Chimera Virtual Data Language (VDL) [
140
]. Some projects
have focused on formal computer languages for representing the origins and source
of scientific and declarative data; VDL falls in this category, as do Semantic Web
systems such as W3C's SPARQL which have explicit fine-grained support for rep-
resenting the source of pieces of information, and characteristics of that source.
Others emphasise an analysis of common concepts (often expressed in some for-
mal ontology language) that capture important aspects relating to Time, Event and
Process.
Another consideration is the sharability of Provenance [
141
], in that given a dig-
ital object with a certain Provenance there are a number of directly related objects,
which share the Provenance of that object, including:
•
a copy of the object - which will have identical Provenance plus an additional
event, namely the copy process which created it
•
an object derived from the original object - plus perhaps several others. In this
case the Provenance of the new object inherits Provenance from its “parents”,
and has a new event, namely the process by which it was created.
An important question which needs to be tackled is the extent to which we could
or should avoid duplications of the Provenance entries. It is worth noting that this
question comes to the fore with digital, as opposed to physical, objects.
Finally it is worth remembering that over time the Provenance Information is
added to, for example with each copy or change of curatorship. Each time the person
or system responsible will use the current system for recording provenance. This
each object will inevitably have a collection of heterogeneous entries. Each entry
will (one way or another) have to have its own Representation Information. All this
of course complicated the sharability mentioned above. Virtualisation is likely to
play an important role here since each entry in the provenance will have to do a
certain job in recording time, event and process.
In summary, Provenance Information is bound to be difficult to deal with but is
nevertheless absolutely critical to digital preservation. This sub-section has at least
pointed out some of the challenges and options for their solution.
10.6 Access Rights Management
When one hears about Digital Rights, one will probably think about restrictions and
payment of fees that one must respect if one wants to download and enjoy one's
favourite song or read some parts of the intriguing e-book about digital preservation
found on Internet. That's true, but Digital Rights exist and have a legal validity even
if one is not forced to respect the conditions. So, which are the issues that Digital
Rights pose on the long-term preservation?
