Digital heritage: Semantic challenges of long-term preservation

The major digital preservation initiatives are about as old as the idea of the Semantic Web but the research areas only had little effect upon each other. This article identifies connections between the two research agendas. Three types of ageing processes are distinguished which affect digital records: media ageing, semantic ageing, and cultural ageing. It is argued that a period of 100 years constitutes an appropriate temporal frame of reference for addressing the problem of semantic ageing. Ongoing format migration constitutes currently the best option for temporal scaling at the semantic level. It can be formulated as an ontology matching problem. Research issues arising from this perspective are formulated that relate to the identification of long-term change patterns of ontologies and the long-term monitoring of ontology usage. Finally, challenges of cultural ageing are discussed.