The Adaptable Viral Archive

In this paper, the author considers how semantic technologies may impact the design of future archives, which require both very secure approaches to maintaining data, metadata, and their provenance, as well as the most cost effective operation possible. One potential application for semantic technologies may be improving the automation of system configuration, allowing an archive to be ``self-replicating'' or ``viral'' – meaning that the archive infrastructure as well as its data could automatically pack itself into a self-contained structure that could be transmitted to a new site and automatically unpack itself. A more challenging problem is likely to be dealing with the evolution of the semantics of the collection and of the archive's user communities over an extended period of time.