Deal with conflict, capture the relationship: the case of digital object properties

Properties of digital objects play a central role in digital preservation. All key preservation services are linked via a common understanding of the properties which describe the digital objects in a repository's care. Unfortunately, different services deal with properties on sometimes different levels of description. While, for example, a preservation characterization service may extract the fontSize of a string, the preservation planning service may require the preservation of the text’s formatting. Additionally, a value for the same property may be obtained in various ways, sometimes resulting in different observed values. Furthermore, properties are not always equally applicable across different file formats. This report investigates where in these three situations relationships between properties need to be defined to overcome possible misalignments. The analysis was based on observations gained during a case study of the nature of the properties that are captured in different institutions’ preservation requirements and those of use in Planets preservation services.