Significant properties in the preservation of relational databases

Abstract

Relational Databases are the most frequent type of databases used by organizations worldwide and are the base of several information systems. As in all digital objects, and concerning the digital preservation of them, the signi cant properties (signi cant characteristics) must be de ned so that adopted strategies are appropriate. In previous work a neutral format (hardware and software independent) | DBML | was adopted to achieve a standard format used in the digital preservation of the relational databases data and structure. In this paper we walk further in the de nition of the signi cant properties by considering the database semantics as an important characteristic that should be also preserved. For the representation of this higher level of abstraction we are going to use an ontology based approach. We will extract the entityrelationship model from the DBML representation and we will represent it as an ontology.