A formal approach to the modelling of digital archives

Abstract

Understanding digital information for users who have different background knowledge becomes important for archival information systems. Key challenges include contextual knowledge changing over time and across different designated communities, and the lack of the reference knowledge among them. Therefore, in order to help users understand digital archives precisely, an archival system should preserve its resources along with their underlying community knowledge, and support the interpretation of their concepts in the right context together with relevant concepts. This research presents a formal approach to digital archives including ontology for preserving the evolution of contextual knowledge. In addition, a prototype has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility and suitability of the proposed formal approach. It is found that the proposed approach can serve as a framework to enhance the capability of the existing archival information systems with regard to the fulfillment of the need of understanding digital archives. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.