Preserving logical and physical structure of information by "metadata driven imitation"

According to research in the area of digital preservation (Dollar 2000), logical and physical structure of a document/record are important to preserve in order to make the document understandable. In layman terms this means that the order and visual attributes of a document should be preserved. At the same time, exact copies of digital files can easily be made, but the problem then lies in that the original application is needed to render the document readable again. To make archived documents/records easily accessible and useable in the future with­out the need of their original application, I suggest that imitative copies with their logical and physical structure intact, are made. These can then easily be distributed to a wide audience (the public) for example through the web. In order to achieve this I suggest a "metadata-driven imitation" where metadata is used to describe the logical and physical structure of the document, preferably combined with a backdrop that holds static visual characteristics. For this purpose I have used a couple of different but complementing perspectives, namely; The Performance Model, The Open Archival Information System model, the Model-View-Controller framework and the Underlying Abstract Form. The outcome of this combination is "metadata-driven imitation", a general suggestion on how logical and physical structure can be preserved, thus providing the possibility to access the original docment/record as well as the possibility to process the data.Godkänd; 2006; 20070912 (jorgen_n