A Risk Analysis of File Formats for Preservation Planning

Roman Graf and Sergiu Gordea:

A Risk Analysis of File Formats for Preservation Planning

In: IPRES 2013 – Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects ; ed. José Borbinha, Michael Nelson, Steve Knight, http://purl.pt/24107, ISBN 978-972-565-493-4

Abstract:

This paper presents an approach for automatic estimation of preservation risk for file formats. The main contribution of this work is a definition of the risk factors with associated severity level and its automatic computation. Our goal is to apply a solid knowledge base automatically extracted from linked open data repositories as the basis of the risk analysis system for digital preservation. This method is meant to facilitate decision making with regard to preservation of digital content in libraries and archives. The File Format Metadata Aggregator tool is employed in order to aggregate well founded and trusted file format information through linked data and inferred knowledge in the domain of long-term information preservation. The ontology mapping technique is employed for collecting the information from the web of linked data and integrating it in a common representation. Furthermore, we employ AI technologies (i.e. expert rules, clustering) for inferring explicit knowledge on the nature and preservation friendliness of the file formats. A statistical analysis of the aggregated information and the qualitative analysis of the aggregated knowledge are presented in the evaluation part of the paper. A Web service is created to support programmatic access to format and risk analysis reports.

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