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DCCU An Extended Digital Curation Lifecycle
Model
Panos Constantopoulos, Costis Dallas, Ion
Androutsopoulos, Stavros Angelis, Antonios
Deligiannakis, Dimitris Gavrilis, Yannis Kotidis,
Christos Papatheodorou Digital Curation Unit,
Athena Research Centre
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Why Digital Curation?

• Diversity of digital information produced by the
  public and private sector organizations
• The value of these digital assets can grow
  considerably if new, or combined uses of them are
  technically enabled.
• Risk the repositories to become unfit for use
  data mortuaries

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Challenges

• Adequate representation and long-term access to
  digital information as its context of use changes
• Adopt a multidisciplinary approach (computer
  science, management science, library
  information science) to serve a broad range of
  constituencies such as e-government,
  organizational records, e-repositories and
  digital heritage.

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DCC Curation Lifecycle Model

• Generic graphical high-level overview of the
  stages required for successful curation and
  preservation of digital material from initial
  conceptualisation Higgins, 2007
• 3 categories of actions
• Full lifecycle throughout the lifecycle of
  digital objects
• Sequential lifecycle undertaken in a specific
  order
• Occasional less frequently activities

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DCC Curation Lifecycle Model Full Lifecycle

• Description and Representation Information
• Administrative, descriptive, technical,
  structural and preservation metadata
• information necessary for the understanding and
  rendering of the object and its metadata.

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DCC Curation Lifecycle Model Full Lifecycle

• Preservation Planning
• Administrative and management plans for the
  actions of the lifecycle model
• Community Watch and Participation
• Using appropriate standards and tools
• Helping their development and evolution.
• Curate and Preserve
• Be aware of and undertake all the management and
  administrative actions planned to promote
  curation and preservation throughout the curation
  lifecycle.

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DCC Curation Lifecycle Model Sequential
Lifecycle

• Conceptualise plan data creation and storage
• Create or receive data its necessary metadata.
• Appraisal of the data for long-term preservation
  use well-documented guidelines, policies and
  legal requirements.
• Data ingestion transfer the data to
  repositories, ensure use of standards during
  transfer

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DCC Curation Lifecycle Model Sequential
Lifecycle

• Preservation actions
• data clean validate
• generate preservation metadata
• Ensure acceptable data structures or file formats
• Secure data storage
• Ensure data is available to users and re-users
• Migrate data to different formats and store the
  results of different selection queries on the data

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DCC Curation Lifecycle Model Occasional

• Disposal of data that have not followed proper
  curation and preservation guidelines
• Reappraisal of data that fail current validation
  procedures for further appraisal and reselection
• Migration of data to a different format

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Is the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model Complete?

• DCU digital curation processes model
• A model presented recently Constantopoulos
  Dallas, 2008
• 11 processes - 2 categories
• Context management
• Digital resources lifecycle management
• Are there processes not included in the DCC model?

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DCU Model
Covered in the DCC model? - YES

• Appraisal
• Development of criteria for the evaluation of
  potential resources
• Selection of the resources that may become
  subject to subsequent curation processes

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DCU Model
Covered in the DCC model? - YES

• Ingest
• Digital recording of image, sound, text and data
• Digitization of analog recordings on various
  physical carriers
• Importing digital resources from other sources,
  including repositories

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DCU Model

• Classification, indexing cataloguing
• Produce logical indices for information
  management
• Produce subject indices and indices related to
  the intended or possible uses of digital resources

Covered in the DCC model? - YES
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DCU Model

• Knowledge enhancement
• New knowledge about real-world entities,
  situations and events represented by digital
  resources, about their wider context and domain,
  or even about the digital resources
• Knowledge encoded and organized in annotations,
  rules and/or ontologies
• Knowledge exploited by intelligent agents,
  capable of reasoning/inferring new semantics
• Each knowledge addition is related to a different
  view, angle of interpretation or application
• The information regarding the curator needs to be
  maintained and preserved as well

Covered in the DCC model? - NO
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DCU Model
Covered in the DCC model? - YES

• Presentation, publication dissemination
• Generation of new artefacts (scientific,
  scholarly, artistic, etc.) from existing primary
  or secondary digital resources

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DCU Model
Covered in the DCC model? - NO

• User experience
• Capture the interaction between users and
  resources, and the effects of this interaction
• how the stored, curated preserved info is
  utilized accessed by the users through their
  queries and their interaction
• Web 2.0 communities. Interaction visible in
  social tags, annotations other Web 2.0
  artifacts

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DCU Model
Covered in the DCC model? - YES

• Repository management
• A function concerning both actual (centralized or
  distributed) and virtual repositories, as well as
  access mechanisms

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DCU Model

• Preservation
• Digital recording of image, sound, text and data
• Digitization of analog recordings on various
  physical carriers
• Importing digital resources from other sources,
  including repositories

Covered in the DCC model? - YES
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DCU Model
Covered in the DCC model? - YES

• Goal and usage modelling
• Capture intentions of the creators and the users
  of a given class of digital resources, together
  with the usage patterns of the resources

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DCU Model
Covered in the DCC model? - YES

• Domain modelling
• Produces or refines representations of expert
  knowledge about a domain of interest

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DCU Model
Covered in the DCC model? - NO

• Authority management
• Controlled vocabularies (i.e., geographic names,
  historical periods, chemical molecules,
  biological species, etc.) used by convention to
  denote concepts, properties and relations
• How these authorities evolve over time

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The DCCU Model

• Compared to DCC Lifecycle Model
• A modified lifecycle action (Curation,
  Preservation and Knowledge Enhancement),
  containing information about the knowledge
  enhancement of data.
• A modified lifecycle action (Description and
  Representation Information), containing
  information about authorities.
• A sequential lifecycle action (User Experience).

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Conclusion

• Examined 2 parallel models for digital curation
• Investigated actions not present in the DCC model
• Proposed an enhanced model including selected
  additional actions
• Future directions
• Elaborate operational details of the extended
  lifecycle model
• Incorporate a full range of context management
  actions