Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The registry also contains maintenance tools for user interaction allowing for
•
Manual RepInfo ingest
•
Creation and maintenance of the XML structures (RepInfoLabels) which con-
nect related RepInfo in the Registry into an OAIS network (using the predefined
categories Semantic, Structure and Other)
Registry component has the following responsibilities:
•
ingest RepInfo into Registry-with appropriate name, description and classifica-
tion
•
extract RepInfo from Registry reliably.
•
search Registry for RepInfo matching appropriate (wild carded) criteria
(a combination of name, description or classification)
•
keep a full audit trail providing PDI generation
In addition there is a development Java API allowing software developers to work
with and develop applications around any implementation of RORRI.
However the networks of information stored by RORRI must be connected and
associated to the data they describe. This packaging is described in
Chap. 11
, with
an implementation described in
Sect. 17.10
.
Keeping all these supporting “metadata” organised and bound to the original
digital asset raises complex problems, as follows:
-
What “metadata” should go into an AIP?
-
How can “metadata” be kept up to date within an AIP?
-
How can the relationships between information objects be expressed?
-
How can remote “metadata” be adequately referenced?
-
How can the re-use of “metadata” be facilitated?
The concept of Information Packaging addresses these problems. Requirements
gathering and a detailed study of the current state of the art technology had
shown that in addition to these points there was a need for the STFC packaging
implementation to provide benefits such as:
- facilitating information transfer and archival by providing a mechanism to bind
a Digital Asset together with all of the information needed to ensure its long
term usability and understandability in a standard transferable unit
- allowing detailed specification of information structures and the relationships
between information objects
- providing support for post ingestion processing such as data analysis, informa-
tion reuse and format migration and transformation
- providing packages which are platform independent to facilitate electronic
transfer between often remote heterogeneous data systems
- providing packages that are self describing, containing all the information
necessary to allow the extraction or discovery of component information objects
- providing packages that described themselves using a standard syntax or lan-
guage which could be validated by a document model
