Metadata about digital objects help users find, understand, use and reuse those objects. Longevity of digital objects is a vital issue for digital preservation, which means that the metadata about digital objects must be maintained as well, so that their content and meaning should be maintained over time. Open Archival Information System (OAIS) defines three metadata components, which have to be maintained with Digital Object – Representation Information of Digital Object, Preservation Description Information (PDI) in an Information Package, and the Content Information given to every Information Package. Provenance of a digital object, which is one of the five categories of PDI, is a crucial record of the history of the object over its lifecycle. Since metadata are exchanged as digital objects on the Web, machine-readable and interoperable provenance description of metadata is required for the long- term maintenance of metadata. This paper presents issues in the longevity of metadata, especially the issue of metadata provenance based on the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles (DCAP), which is well known for metadata interoperability in the networked information environment. The paper first briefly discusses features of metadata as first class objects on the Web. Then, we address potential risks in affecting interpretability of digital objects and issues in the consistent maintenance of metadata. Next, the W3C PROV standard for general provenance description and Resource Description Framework (RDF) for metadata exchange on the Web are adopted as the base models for provenance description of metadata. We developed simple provenance description models for formal provenance description for both structural features and vocabularies of metadata. The models are designed based on Entities and Activities defined by the W3C PROV in correspondence with primitive changes of metadata application profiles and metadata vocabularies, respectively. We also provide formal provenance description examples corresponding to structural changes in a metadata application profile along with semantic changes in the use of its metadata vocabulary. We discuss limitations of our proposed models and review provenance related research. Finally, the main findings of this research are summarized in the conclusions.

iPRES, Kyoto

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