Learning PREMIS Knowledge Base: a Tool for Humans and Machines

Inspired by the “Knowledge Base” definition of the Open Archival Information System: “A set of information, incorporated by a person or system, that allows that person or system to understand received information”, we developed a mapping model for a) capturing the knowledge base of the digital preservation metadata, represented by the PREMIS Data Dictionary, and b) generating a SKOS vocabulary, that represents the PREMIS Knowledge Base. The article proposes, the PREMIS Knowledge Base as a knowledge tool, targeted to the digital preservation community, that can be used for learning, using, and updating preservation metadata. The tool bridges the knowledge expressed by the PREMIS OWL ontology with its knowledge context, stored in a “computable form”, and obtained by a semi-automatic transformation mapping from the PREMIS Data Dictionary. PREMIS Knowledge Base, as a documentation tool, provides designated community with web resources for human consultation, and as a computable knowledge tool, provides RDF resources exhibited for software agent consumption. The PREMIS Knowledge Base candidates itself to be integrated into the PREMIS OWL ontology, via annotation property, allowing ontology and related datasets to be enriched and documented by their originating knowledge context, and thus to be properly interpreted.