Application of OAIS to the preservation of linked data

There is a demand that society reap the benefits of the investment made in creating the growing deluge of data with which we are faced. Data becomes more valuable and exploitable the more it is combined. Linked Data is one of the growing and most flexible ways of doing this. Yet this poses a problem. The very scale and diversity of the data is compounded by the scale, flexibility and diversity of the links, and there is a need to preserve some, if not all, of the data and the links since combining recent data with older data is a vital part of the overall process, not least for longitudinal studies. This paper summarises the state of the art of the understanding of the fundamental techniques of digital preservation using the concepts introduced by OAIS (ISO 14721), and then systematically discusses these techniques in the context of Linked Data current practices. It derives from the work performed in the PRELIDA (www.prelida.eu) project.