Dlf 2011UDFR-a-semantic-registry-for-format-representation-information-v1

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Digital Library Federation Forum Baltimore, October 31-November 2, 2011 UDFR: A Semantic Registry for Format Representation Information Lisa Dawn Colvin Abhishek Salve Stephen Abrams UC Curation Center California Digital Library

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Outline  What  Why  How  When

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Why formats? “Format” is the dividing line between bits and information ffd8ffe000104a46 SOI 4946000102010083 APP0 JFIF 1.2 00830000ffed0fb0 APP13 IPTC 50686f746f73686f APP2 ICC 7020332e30003842 DQT 494d03e90a507269 SOF0 183x512 6e7420496e666f00 DRI Syntax Semantics 0000007800000000 DHT 0048004800000000 SOS 02f40240ffeeffee ECS0 0306025203470528 RST0 03fc000200000048 ECS1 00480000000002d8 RST1 0228000100000064 ECS2 0000000100030... ...

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Why formats? There are many necessary preservation activities that can be usefully performed on bits qua bits But to preserve information you most act on formatted bits and know what those formats mean • Preservation of syntax and semantics

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Unified Digital Format Registry “A reliable, publicly accessible, and sustainable knowledge base of file format representation information for use by the digital preservation community” • “Unification” of the function and holdings of PRONOM and GDFR http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM http://gdfr.info/ • Open source platform / GPL • Semantic wiki • Funded by the Library of Congress

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Timeline PRONOM – National Archives [UK], 2002 http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM “ready access to reliable technical information about the nature of electronic records” JHOVE – Harvard, 2003 http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove “digital object validation and characterization” GDFR – Harvard/OCLC, 2006 http://gdfr.info/ “a distributed and replicated registry of format information populated and vetted by experts and enthusiasts worldwide”

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Timeline UDFR – Ad hoc stakeholder community, 2009 • Resolve PRONOM IPR issues and develop a community- supported open source solution • Advance beyond legacy RDBMS and XML database technology UDFR – CDL, January 2011 http://udfr.org/ “a semantic registry for digital preservation” • Stakeholder meeting, April 2011 • Beta release, November 2011 • Production release, January 2012

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Representation information What you need to know about something in order to exploit that thing meaningfully [OAIS/ISO 14720] Information that lets you answer important preservation questions • What format is it? • What are its significant properties? • Is it valid? • Is it at risk? • How can I render/play/read it? • What can it be transformed into? • And how?

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Why semantic? Everyone wants to say something about everything • The semantic web lets anyone say anything about anything • Understandable to both people and machines

Unified Digital Format Registry a semantic registry for digital preservation Data modeling Abstract Controlled Base Vocabulary … holder dependency holder creator owner Abstract product Abstract Process IPR Agent Holding Digest Product Signature maintainer reference embodies ipr specification file digest Abstract External Software Hardware Media Document File Format Signature Internal Signature input / output signature Character CompressionAssessment Grammar File Format Encoding Algorithm grammar assessment

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Provenance “Trust, but verify” • Complete change history at the assertion level, including – Who made the assertion, and when? – Confidence based on personal and institutional reputation • Imprimatur by technically knowledgeable reviewers

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Ontologies Prefixu Namespace udfrs http://udfr.org/onto# udfr http://udfr.org/udfr/ dc http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ dcterms http://purl.org/dc/terms/ foaf http://xmls.com/foaf/0.1/ owl http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl# pronom http://reference.data.gov.uk/technical-registry/ rdf http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# rdfs http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema# skos http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core# xds http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Technology stack HTTP / SPARQL JavaScript / CSS Ontowiki Erfurt / RDFAuthor http://aksw.org/Projects/Erfurt http://ontowiki.net/ https://github.com/AKSW/RDFauthor Zend framework Virtuoso 4store http://www.zend.com/ http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/ PHP RDF http://www.php.net/ http://www.w3.org/RDF Apache httpd http://httpd.apache.org/

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Initial population Export from PRONOM • Working with TNA to identify appropriate subset • Transform to cross-walk modeling differences

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Licensing Code is available under GPLv3 http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html • Hosted on BitBucket http://www.bitbucket.org/udfr Data is contributed and available under CC-BY http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ • Consistent with UK open government license applicable to PRONOM data http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Demo

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Lessons learned People with semantic experience are scarce Too much time evaluating/prototyping potential technology choices More difficulty than anticipated integrating disparate open source products 0.x software is often numbered that for a reason Feature lists aren’t (always)

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Lessons learned Availability of a worldwide selection of products is a good thing (except when you don’t read German) • Excellent support from AKWS/Universität Leipzig Modeling differences • RDF (non-)standards VM deployment • Disparate IT organizations supporting dev/prod instances

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation Next steps Long-term governance and operational support Technical maintenance and enhancement Replication/synchronization Building contributor and reviewer communities

Unified Digital Format Registrya semantic registry for digital preservation For more information UDFR UC3 http://udfr.org/ http://www.cdlib.org/uc3 http://bitbucket.org/udfr uc3@ucop.edu Stephen Abrams Mark Reyes PRONOM Lisa Colvin Abhishek Salve http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM Patricia Cruse Tracy Seneca Scott Fisher Joan Starr GDFR Erik Hetzner Carly Strasser http://gdfr.info/ Greg Janée Marisa Strong John Kunze Adrian Turner OntoWiki Margaret Low David Loy Perry Willett http://ontowiki.net/Projects/OntoWiki Virtuoso http://www.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/Main/VOSRDFWP Agile Knowledge and Semantic Web (AKSW), Universität Leipzig http://aksw.org/

Dlf 2011UDFR-a-semantic-registry-for-format-representation-information-v1

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