Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
7.1.2 Preservation Without Automation
Going beyond a simple checklist one can use OAIS as the framework for, for exam-
ple, Representation Information. Here we must simply ensure that there is adequate
Representation Information for the Designated Community. Other users may or may
not be able to understand the data content.
Any piece of that Representation Information could itself be as “opaque” as any
other piece of data. OAIS requires that each piece of Representation Information
has its own Representation Information - with the recursion stopping, as dis-
cussed in Sect.
8
, where it meets, in a sense which needs to be properly defined,
the Knowledge Base of the Designated Community - which itself needs to be
adequately defined.
However even the Designated Community may need to put in a
considerable effort, for example to read documentation and cre-
ate specialised software at each level of the recursion, in order to
understand and use the content.
The point is that without the Representation Information this would
very likely be impossible; application of digital forensics or guess-
work may be allow something to be done, but one would not be
certain.
Example:
The Representation Information could be in the form of a detailed
document describing, in simple text and diagrams, how the information is
encoded. The text description would have to be read by a human and presum-
ably software would have to be written - possibly requiring significant effort.
The IETF Request for Comments (RFC) system (
http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html
)
is an example of this use of simple text files to describe all the major systems
in the Internet.
7.1.3 Preservation with Automation and Interoperability
The next level is to try to ensure that the use of the Representation Information
is as easy and automated as possible, and is widely usable beyond the Designated
Community. This demands increasing automation in the access, interpretation and
use of Representation Information, and also the provision of more clues to users
from different disciplines.
For the latter one can begin by offering some common views on data - for exam-
ple allowing easier use in generic applications - by means of virtualisation. An
example of this would be where the information is essentially an image. This fact
could be made explicit in the Representation Information so that an application
would know that it makes sense to handle the data as a 2-dimensional image. In
