A Semantic Risk Management Framework for Digital Audio-Visual Media Preservation

Digitised and born-digital Audio-Visual (AV) content presents new challenges for preservation and Quality Assurance (QA) to ensure that cultural heritage is accessible for the long term. Digital archives have developed strategies for avoiding, mitigating and recovering from digital AV loss using IT-based systems, involving QA tools before ingesting files into the archive and utilising file-based replication to repair files that may be damaged while in the archive. In this paper, we focus on dealing with issues resulting from system errors, rather than random failure or corruption; issues caused by the people, systems and processes that handle the digital AV content. We present a semantic risk management framework designed to support preservation experts in managing workflow risks, combining workflow and risk specification within a risk management process designed to support continual improvement of workflow processes. Keywords–Risk management; semantic modelling; business processes; workflows; media preservation; digital archives.