Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
whether or not colour, for example, is a significant property of the given digital
object or collection will depend on the extent to which colour features affect the
quality and usability of the preserved object for a designated community,
and
decisions about which Significant Properties to maintain will depend on insti-
tutional priorities, anticipated use, knowledge of the designated community, the
types of materials involved, and the financial and technical resources available to
the repository
Within the InSPECT project, Wilson [
156
] defines Significant Properties in a similar
fashion as
the characteristics of digital objects that must be preserved over time in order
to ensure the continued accessibility, usability and meaning of the objects.
He categorises these Significant Properties into Content, Context, Appearance,
Structure, and Behaviour. Knight [
90
] built on Wilson's work and proposed a frame-
work of description for Significant Properties which includes identifier, function,
level of significance, optionally the designated community, and optionally notes of
any property constraints.
That project applied this to a number of digital object types (structured docu-
ments, raster images, audio files, email messages). Four further studies considered
significant properties of vector images [
157
], moving images [
158
], software [
159
],
and learning objects [
160
]. It is notable that each of these studies took a different
view on what constituted a significant property. Again, here we have notions of sig-
nificant property which cover some aspects of meaning (content and behaviour),
although it is not clear how these are to be supported.
Thus it can be seen that there has been no general agreement on the definition
of what a significant property is, what its primary role is, or how they should be
categorised, recorded and tested. Moreover it has not been clear how to apply any
of the proposals to Non-Rendered digital objects (see
Sect. 4.2
).
13.6.1.1 Limitations of Significant Properties
Clearly the usages of Significant Properties focus on those aspects of digital objects
which can be evaluated in some way and checked as to whether they have been
preserved. However the meaning associated with a value of the Significant Property
is nowhere defined. Thus it is assumed that the value of a Significant Property will
be understood by the curator and Designated Community. Therefore it must also
be the case that the Significant Properties, while useful, do not strictly contribute
to understandability of the Information Object. For example a Significant Property
might be that a text character must be red, however the meaning (significance) of
that “redness”, i.e. why is it red and what is the importance of its redness to its
intended audience, is not defined. Therefore this must already be part of the intended
