Preservation of Evolving Complex Information Objects

Having trustworthiness as the driver, the long-term preservation of evolving complex information objects from a RDFbased Virtual Research Environment (VRE) has to ensure the integrity, authenticity, and provenance of the research data it encompasses. Besides the known difficulties, preservation of evolving complex information objects from a VRE provide additional challenges, as not only the objects created inside the VRE but also the VRE as such with its ontologies describing the structure of the digital objects, and additionally any referenced bitstream data, can evolve and change over time. This change over time needs to be captured in such a way, so that not only each object can be recreated to any version from its past, but also its context, namely all surrounding and connected digital objects, and correspondingly also their context and so on. Further, we propose to store all fixity information of the digital objects themselves and also of the provenance to a public blockchain, where it would serve as a single source of truth, which all users could trust.