Glossary of Terms

Audit: process with which the system checks for all aspects of the correct conformation of objects in the ingestion jobs through time, periodically and manually, and in retrieve processes, thus guaranteeing their conservation and availability.

Catalog: collection of preserved objects and their registration for later access to them.

Ingestion: process in which one or more objects, complying with specific criteria, are inserted into the system for indefinite preservation.

LUOI: LIBSAFE universal object identifier is an internal LIBSAFE identifier that allows for simple direct access to a specific object.

Metadata (descriptor): data that defines another data. The concept of data is similar to the use of indexes to locate objects instead of data.

Metadata schema: metadata set kept for an object, that allows for its cataloging and search in the system.

Object: minimum unit for preservation, it references what the user of the application wants to preserve for later retrieval. It is usually made up of a collection of files, structured in folders, complying with a set of conditions, and tagged by a set of metadata that allow for its cataloging and search in the system.

Object name: is a unique or versioning identifier associated to an object, and it is defined by the name of the object folder at the moment of ingestion.

Preservation: action which pretends to guarantee availability of the preserved objects in time, minimizing inaccessibility risks, be it for inexistence of the digital information, impossibility to understand the formats used for representation, or data corruption.

Preservation area: division of the repository that allows for a classification of the preserved objects, with criteria that may be brought into the workflows, as for example, audits, permissions and queries.

Preservation plan: set of conditions and controls established at a given moment for a preservation plan, which is used to guarantee the correct composition of the objects to be ingested into the system. This concept has an almost direct correspondence with that of the OAIS SIP (Submission Information Package) and the submission agreement.

Retrieval: process which makes a copy of a preserved object available. The copy will be recovered according to the diffusion agreements, which contain the conservation, transformation and evolution conditions respect to the original object, and according to the access permissions of the consumer (designated community) for the requested objects.

Version: it is a specific representation of an object. It is common to use the expression object as a synonym for object version, as an object is always represented by a specific version of itself. For the preservation system, object versions may be, for example, different digitizations of the same work.