Some preliminary ideas towards a theory of digital preservation

The problem of digital preservation is one of the most challenging research problems faced by the community of digital libraries today, receiving growing interest by researchers and practitioners alike. One of the major gaps in the related research is the lack of a general agreement on a formal model to describe the problem or on a formal description of the required properties of a good solution to the problem. This work aims to fill this gap by presenting a number of ideas towards a formal, mathematical, logic-based description of preservation as a scientific discipline, to the end of deriving a methodology resting on solid theoretical grounds. We will present and justify a number of desired properties of such a formalism and introduce a model that handles the static aspects of the problem; some ideas related to the dynamics of preservation will be presented as well.