The CASPAR Key Components Implementation - Advanced Digital Preservation

Information Technology Reference

In-Depth Information

users (and applications) a clue as to which piece of RepInfo is of relevance for any

particular purpose.

In terms of standardising the access, we propose that identifiers (called here

Curation Persistent Identifiers - CPID) are associated with any data object, which

point to the appropriate Representation Information, as illustrated in Fig. 17.3 .

The concepts underlying these Persistent Identifiers are discussed in detail in

Sect. 10.3.2 .

In this diagram we introduce the idea of a Registry/Repository of Representation

Information. However it must be stressed that

this is not intended to indicate a single central registry, which would

be a single point of failure in such a preservation system, but rather a

network of distributed, perhaps independent, registries and

the arrows are uni-directional, in other words there is a pointer from

the “data” to its Representation Information BUT not necessarily

vice-versa, because one piece of Representation Information might

be applicable to many thousands of data instances.

The registry concept has the advantage that, as will be expanded on later in this

topic, it facilitates the sharing of the effort in producing Representation Information.

It must also be stressed that this conceptual model does not imply that all

Representation Information is kept in Registries; in fact it is perfectly sensible

1 - User gets data from

archive. Data has

associated Curation

Persistent Identifier

(CPID)

The Digital Object

could have RepInfo

packed with it, as well

as CPID

1

CPID

Digital

Object