Preservation Metadata

DAVID has developed a preservation metadata model, which has been contributed to standardisation of the MPEG Multimedia Preservation Application Format (MP-AF).

The scope of the preservation metadata model is to document the history of creation and processing steps applied, as well as their parameters. The model serves as interface between various components that produce preservation-related metadata in different (often proprietary) formats and consuming applications, such as risk management application.

The model represents the preservation actions that were actually applied. The model supports a set of specific types of activities in the model (e.g., digitisation, with possible further specialisations, e.g. film scan), in order to improve interoperability between preservation systems. It also describes the parameters of these activities.
The model is designed around three main groups of entities: content entities (DigitalItems, their Components and related Resources), Activities and Operators (Agent, Tool) and their properties. The content entities are created, used or modified in an Activity, which involves Operators that contribute to performing the Activity. The basic entities of the model and their relations are shown the figure below.

The DAVID preservation metadata model has been contributed to the standardisation process for the MPEG Multimedia Preservation Application Format (MP-AF), expected to be finalised in 2015. More details about the data model can be found in this publication.

In order to handle documents conforming to MP-AF, we have implemented a C++ library. With this library application developers are able to create preservation metadata descriptions, manipulate them, serialize to XML and de-serialize – with validation – from XML. Target operating systems are Windows, Linux/Unix and Mac OS X systems, supporting the 32 and 64 bit versions of the systems respectively. The library will be published soon under the open source license LGPL v3.