I mentioned in this recent post that the next step for our work at the Nationaal Archief on representation information registries was to prepare a set of guidelines on publishing representation information, with the aim of making sure that we can easily make use of each other’s published knowledge.
A couple of weeks ago I finished an early draft of this document (with more questions than answers!) and send it round to OPF members and a few others we’ve been collaborating closely with. That has given me some useful feedback that I am starting to incorporate into a more polished draft.
More feedback is always better though! V0.1 is attached to this post – I’d very much welcome comments on this, either in comments on this post, or by email to [email protected]. For such guidelines to be useful they need to have broad acceptance and so it would be great to get as much input as possible at this early stage.
Holidays will cause a bit of delay in producing the next version, but I’ll post it here when it’s ready – probably in the second half of July.
Other recent efforts…
For anyone looking at this issue, I just want to flag up some other related work. Firstly, the PRONOM team recently published an initial ontology here (linking to here), and are seeking feedback. Secondly, the UDFR team have just started to develop their ontology here. It would be nice to bring these strands of work together if possible, and if all parties are willing to develop their ontologies in the open, I suspect working with UDFR on BitBucket might work rather well.
Beyond that, I would urge you to re-read Barbara’s comment on an earlier post, and bring the issue of data governance and validation into the picture. For me, the most important issues are the scope and structure of the data model, the way in which the data will be authored and, critically, how the data will be validated. In particular, while a strong provenance model might provide a good way of transmitting trust, it does not help to create that trust in the first place.
And a timely blog from the LoC…
And here’s an update on the status of the UDFR from the LoC’s excellent digital preservation blog, The Signal.