Digital Long-Term Preservation using a Layered Semantic Metadata Schema of PREMIS

In Belgium, many institutions have a lot of information stored on analogue carriers. This information is likely to get lost if no digitized copy of the information is stored for the long term. Long-term preservation is subjected to many risks. Overcoming those risks starts with describing the data thoroughly. The metadata needed for long-term preservation are descriptive metadata to search and manage the whole archive, binary metadata to describe the bitstreams, technical metadata describing the files, structural metadata for the representation information, preservation metadata for keeping track of the provenance of the data, and rights metadata. Therefore, we developed a layered semantic metadata schema. The top layer holds the descriptive metadata, the bottom layer holds all the information necessary for long-term preservation. The top layer consist of an OWL representation of Dublin Core, while for the bottom layer we developed an OWL representation of the preservation standard PREMIS 2.0, extended with a vocabulary defining the legal roles of a person, organization, or software. This way, our model offers all the necessary metadata for long-term preservation.