The Role of OAIS Representation Information in the Digital Curation of Crystallography Data

Abstract

Reusable high quality data are emerging as the raw material of contemporary e-science. Large volumes of scientific data are now “born-digital” and need to be curated to facilitate use and reuse. Representation Information (RI) as defined by the OAIS Reference Model is increasingly recognised as being vital to the long term curation and preservation of meaningful and reliable digital data. This paper is concerned with an investigation of RI for crystallography data and its role in the curation, maintenance and management of such data. We describe how the explicit recording of relevant RI can facilitate long term access and maintain intelligibility of the Crystallographic Information File format (a critical file format in the crystallography domain).