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Digital Object Architecture: Long Term Persistence of Information
If you’ve ever run into browser 404 errors — “Page does not exist” — when browsing the internet and coming across a news article or page that existed maybe a year or two ago but has since been removed, you might think about the permanency of information stored on the internet. If data is disappearing after only a year or two, how can we expect data to survive twenty years or further into the future?
That kind of thinking about being able to persist data for long periods of time drove the development of a technology called Digital Object Architecture (DOA). The DOA was created by Robert Kahn at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in the early 1990’s. The design was based on research done by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
DOA manages digital objects. A digital object has core data, associated metadata, and pointers to where and how information can be retrieved.
Robert Kahn, CEO at CNRI, said that “moving away from identifying information about things to identifying the information itself, represented in digital form, makes it possible to associate this information with other types of information. This ability to link related kinds of information in digital form holds great promise for enabling new ways of doing business in the Internet.”
