Re: Proposed text for provenance section

Hi Folks!

PaulS suggests:

> As to a suggestion for the text, how about something like:
>
> At present we have no evidence that those who actually
> manage archives  require the ability to track changes to
> the *descriptive* metadata over  time.  In traditional library/
> information management systems logs are kept  around to track
> metadata changes temporarily, but it's just not considered
> important to the core mission of managing the \emph{content}
> over time.  Schemas change, contexts change, resources get
> described in myriad ways  (all at the same time), people make
> mistakes, fix them, we add stuff, we remove stuff, and libraries
> do not track all this. It is therefore  difficult to predict the
> potential value(s) and uses of such data and  functionality in
> practice.
>
> However there are some newer kinds of metadata for which the
> community do  seem to want to track provenance; namely, preservation
> metadata, i.e.  capturing and preserving provenance metadata
> related to preservation  activities -- i.e. what was done to
> the digital object over time in order  to preserve it.

JSE: I respect the fact that there will be metadata elements for with
provenance needs to be maintained, and other elements for which such "care and
feeding" is not necessarily required. BUT WHO DECIDES (and when)? Certainly
NOT the system designer. This should be, minimally, a curatorial decision,
probably driven by institutional policy (however one wishes to define
"institutional").

The provenance issue we have been discussing seems related to a thread that
came up more than a month ago, in the context of the History System, where the
question of "what events do we record? and what metadata should we save?" was
raised. Again, such decisions should NOT be a system design issue, but rather
should be driven by (in the HS case) event-triggered *policies*. ("Do
thisAction when thatEvent fires and theseConditions are true...")

These are but two examples of the "lifecycle management of objects" concept
that Mick introduced about two weeks ago: the ability to associate policies
with digital objects for a variety of purposes, including (and esp.) to
facilitate their management. Just as RDF-based technologies promise to
transform the discovery and retrieval of resources, they can also transform
their management, by providing a means of specifying the scope of policies
based upon the characteristics and relationships of objects rather than simply
their position in hierarchies.

John

Received on Tuesday, 8 July 2003 08:19:11 UTC