Linked Data Registry: A New Approach To Technical Registries: Paper - iPRES 2014 - Melbourne

Technical Registries are used in digital preservation to enable organizations to maintain definitions of the formats, format properties, software, migration pathways etc. needed to preserve content over the long term. There have been a number of initiatives to produce technical registries leading to the development of, for example, PRONOM, UDFR and the Planets Core Registry. However, these have all been subject to some criticisms. One problem is that either the information model is fixed and difficult to evolve or flexible but hard for users to understand. However, the main problem is the governance of the information in the registry. This has often been restricted to the host organization, which may have limitations on the investment they can make. This restriction has meant that, whilst other organizations have, perhaps, been free to use the registry they have been unable to add to or edit the information within it. The hosts of the registries have generally been receptive to requests for additions and change but this has still led to issues with timing or when different organizations cannot agree (or just utilize or interpret things in different ways). In this paper we describe a new approach, which has used linked data technology to create the Linked Data Registry (LDR). This approach means it is simple to extend the data model and to link to other sources that provide a more rounded description of an entity. In addition, every effort has been made to ensure there is a simple user interface so that users can easily find and understand the information contained in the registry. This paper describes what is believed to be the first linked data technical registry that can be deployed widely. The key element of the new approach is the distributed maintenance model which is designed to resolve the governance problem. Any organization hosting an LDR instance is free to add and edit content and to extend the model. If an instance of LDR is exposed on the internet, then any other organization is free to retrieve this additional information and hold it in its own LDR instance, alongside locally maintained information and information retrieved from other sources. This means a peer-to-peer network is established where each registry instance in the network chooses which other registry instances to trust and thereby from whom to receive which content. This gives control to each individual organization, since they are not dependent on anyone else but can choose to take different content from appropriate authoritative sources. At the same time it allows collaboration to reduce the administrative burden associated with the maintenance of all of the information