An intelligent decision support system for digital preservation

This paper describes a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on Web services technology designed to assist cultural heritage institutions in the implementation of migration based preservation interventions. The proposed SOA delivers a recommendation service and a method to carry out complex format migrations. The recommendation service is supported by three evaluation components that assess the quality of every migration intervention in terms of its performance (Migration Broker), suitability of involved formats (Format Evaluator) and data loss (Object Evaluator). Throughout the paper the whole workflow between these three components is explained in detail as well as the most relevant tasks that are carried out internally in each of them. The proposed system is also able to produce preservation metadata that can be used by client institutions to document preservation interventions and retain objects’ authenticity. Although the primary goal of this SOA is the implementation of migration based preservation interventions, it can also be used for other purposes such as comparing file formats or evaluating the performance of conversion applications.