Linked Data Registry: A New Approach To Technical Registries
Technical Registries are used in digital preservation to enable
organizations to maintain definitions of the formats, format
properties, software, migration pathways etc. needed to preserve
content over the long term. There have been a number of
initiatives to produce technical registries leading to the
development of, for example, PRONOM, UDFR and the Planets
Core Registry.

However, these have all been subject to some criticisms. One
problem is that either the information model is fixed and difficult
to evolve or flexible but hard for users to understand. However,
the main problem is the governance of the information in the
registry. This has often been restricted to the host organization,
which may have limitations on the investment they can make.
This restriction has meant that, whilst other organizations have,
perhaps, been free to use the registry they have been unable to
add to or edit the information within it. The hosts of the
registries have generally been receptive to requests for additions
and change but this has still led to issues with timing or when
different organizations cannot agree (or just utilize or interpret
things in different ways).

In this paper we describe a new approach, which has used linked
data technology to create the Linked Data Registry (LDR). This
approach means it is simple to extend the data model and to link
to other sources that provide a more rounded description of an
entity. In addition, every effort has been made to ensure there is
a simple user interface so that users can easily find and
understand the information contained in the registry.

This paper describes what is believed to be the first linked data
technical registry that can be deployed widely. The key element
of the new approach is the distributed maintenance model which
is designed to resolve the governance problem. Any organization hosting an LDR instance is free to add and edit content and to
extend the model. If an instance of LDR is exposed on the
internet, then any other organization is free to retrieve this
additional information and hold it in its own LDR instance,
alongside locally maintained information and information
retrieved from other sources. This means a peer-to-peer network
is established where each registry instance in the network
chooses which other registry instances to trust and thereby from
whom to receive which content. This gives control to each
individual organization, since they are not dependent on anyone
else but can choose to take different content from appropriate
authoritative sources. At the same time it allows collaboration to
reduce the administrative burden associated with the
maintenance of all of the information.
["Braud, Maïté", "Carr, James", "Leroux, Kevin", "Rogers, Joseph", "Sharpe, Robert"]
["linked data", "digital preservation", "automation", "technical registries"]