Open Preservation Data: Controlled vocabularies and ontologies for preservation ecosystems

The preservation community is busily building systems for repositories, identification and characterisation, analysis and monitoring, planning and other key activities, and increasingly, these systems are linked to collaborate more effectively. While some standard metadata schemes exist that facilitate interoperability, the controlled vocabularies that are actually used are rare and not powerful enough for the requirements of emerging scalable preservation ecosystems. This article outlines key requirements and elements of such an open ecosystem and discusses the starting points for building such a common language. We then present a core set of controlled vocabulary elements for preservation quality, objectives, policies, and components, and demonstrate how these elements are instantiated to connect preservation planning, preservation watch, and experimentation with preservation policies. We show how these vocabularies are used to enable automation and enable the preservation community to collaborate effectively, and point out extension points and future work.