Significant characteristics to abstract content: Long term preservation of information

Abstract

The (automatic) extraction of significant characteristics of files is an important feature of all long term preservation activities. We propose, however, that for the necessary automatic evaluation of the outcomes of certain preservation actions - notably migration - an approach is necessary, which follows other traditions in the abstraction of format descriptions. To implement a strategy for the automatic evaluation of various actions within a preservation environment, we define two formal, XML base languages: One allowing to define the content of a specific file, the other describing a file format in such a way, that it can be handled by multi-purpose software. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.