The PREMIS Implementation Fair is a yearly event which is held in conjunction with iPRES, the largest digital preservation conference, and brings together PREMIS implementers and the PREMIS editorial board in a joint effort to best steer the development of the open standard for preservation metadata. This year’s event was held as part of iPRES 2014 at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, on October 6^th, 2014. It brought together an international group of about 25 participants whose institutions’ digital preservation repositories are either already using PREMIS or planning to implement it.

The DURAARK project seized this opportunity to talk about the plans to implement PREMIS within the DURAARK workbench and about the questions which have been encountered as part of the implementation efforts. In particular, three issues which the DURAARK project has encountered were presented:

1. The PREMIS Data Dictionary defines preservation metadata as “the information a repository uses to support the digital preservation process”. While PREMIS is not entirely repository-centric per definition, known implementations are usually very specific to that repository’s needs. The DURAARK workbench, however, is meant to be a service to a wide variety of repositories. As such, it is meant to run outside a repository without any knowledge of the system it will pass the information to.
   The question here is whether the DURAARK workbench shall describe itself only as an agent to a repository or whether the DURAARK workbench shall describe itself as a stand-alone eco-system in itself.
2. As the DURAARK workbench is a pre-ingest system which covers multiple tasks and wraps separate tools, e.g., for file format identification, metadata extraction and semantic enrichment, the status of a single agent would hardly cover all preservation metadata output of the pre-ingest workbench. Pre-Ingest workflows are comparatively new to the digital preservation domain – while the main focus of earlier efforts has been put on the needs of the organization / the repository which is responsible for the long-term stewardship of objects, questions around earlier processes have been arising only recently. Due to this “pre-ingest” dependencies and implications are not explicitly covered in standards like the OAIS or in PREMIS. The question is, how information about the external pre-ingest service can be described meaningfully to the repositories and what level of granularity is called for.
3. The last point raised by the project pertains to the way in which the Intellectual Entity is handled. Plainly said, an intellectual entity is “the thing we want to archive”. According to the PREMIS data dictionary intellectual entities can be nested, meaning that one intellectual entity can contain more intellectual entities within. However, no reference implementation is known. Within DURAARK, “a building / structure” is considered an intellectual entity. Representations of the entity, such as a point-cloud scan from September 2014 and an IFC plan from August 2013, always stand in temporal / spatial relationships as the building changes for various reasons or as the representations may only describe a part of the building. They are in some ways different representations of the intellectual entity “building”, but they may significantly differ in content which makes them intellectual entities in themselves.

Discussion with the editorial board representatives during the implementation fair put forth the possibility of using the “environment” entity, which will be newly introduced in the forthcoming PREMIS v3, as a good place to describe the DURAARK workbench. While the existing use cases for the “environment” entity contain rendering environments such as library reading rooms or emulation environments, the DURAARK project has now contributed a new use case to this in form of the pre-ingest workbench. The entity will allow for detailed description of the different agents involved in the workbench’s processes and will enable the pre-ingest workbench to capture information at different levels of granularity.
While it was confirmed that nested entity structures are possible per design, no reference implementation was found and the search continues there.

PREMIS v2.2 data model with forthcoming new “environment” enity in change in v3

The slides of Michelle Lindlar’s presentation at the PREMIS Implementation Fair are available here:

Panel discussion on the future of BIM in Germany

On March 21^st, the 10^th “Building Day” attending to building information modelling took place at the PFL Culture Centre in Oldenburg. Hosted by the Jade University of Applied Sciences, which is among the leading academies in BIM research and study in Germany, the conference brought together referees from Denmark, Germany and the UK.

After an introduction to the level of BIM implementation in Germany by Ulrich Kammeyer (President of the Chamber of Engineers of Lower Saxony and Vice President of the Federal German Chamber of Engineers) and Jürgen Koggelmann (German Federal Ministry for Transport, Building and Urban Development) the audience was briefed on the development status in the UK by Mark Bew (Chairman of the British “BIM Task Group”). Ilka May (ARUP, buildingSMART e.V.) and Lasse Vester (Femern A/S, Sund & Bælt Holding A/S Denmark) presented their sample project Fehmarnbelt tunnel. Siggi Wernik (architectural office Léon Wohlhage Wernik/Berlin, chief executive of buildingSMART e.V. – German speaking chapter) gave a summary and outlook on the German BIM strategy in the run-up to the meeting of the Federal Ministry’s reform commission for large-scale building projects in May.

Presentation of Hon.-Prof. Ing. Hans-Georg Oltmanns on study projects at Jade University of Applied Science

The final section focussed on research and study projects in the curriculum in Oldenburg with presentations by Hans-Georg Oltmanns (professor at Jade University of Applied Sciences and board member of buildingSMART e.V.) and Hans-Hermann Prüser (Educational Dean of the department for Construction & Geoinformation). The conference closed with a panel discussion on future scenarios and consequences for working with BIM.

Within the event the DURAARK project was represented by an article in the conference journal, a poster and flyers. Further contacts and an interchange with Jade University’s department for Construction & Geoinformation have been initiated.

This blog entry is a contribution of Hedda Saemann (TIB), who presented the DURAARK poster at the event.