Terminology and Wish List for a Formal Theory of Preservation

The ability to access and understand digital information in the long term has been the subject of study of the digital preservation field, which is one of the most challenging research problems faced by the community of digital libraries today. The related research has produced a number of ad-hoc solutions which deal mainly with the static aspects of the problem. In this paper we take a different path in an attempt to formally describe the dynamic aspects of the problem. We describe and justify a number of desired properties of a good solution to the problem, as well as the basic steps required in order to get an adequate such formalism. This paper is part of a larger ongoing work towards developing a formal, mathematical, logic-based description of preservation as a scientific discipline, to the end of deriving a methodology resting on solid theoretical grounds.