title: Linked Data Registry: A New Approach To Technical Registries
creators: Maïté Braud James Carr Kevin Leroux Joseph Rogers Robert Sharpe
abstract: 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.
keywords: linked data digital preservation automation technical registries