This paper describes a Web-services-based system which we have developed to enable organizations to semi-automatically preserve their digital collections by dynamically discovering and invoking the most appropriate preservation service, as it is required. By periodically comparing preservation metadata for digital objects in a collection with a software version registry, potential object obsolescence can be detected and a notification message sent to the relevant agent. By making preservation software modules available as Web services and describing them semantically using a machine-processable ontology (OWL-S), the most appropriate preservation service(s) for each object can then be automatically discovered, composed and invoked by software agents (with optional human input at critical decision-making steps). We believe that this approach represents a significant advance towards providing a viable, cost-effective solution to the long term preservation of large-scale collections of digital objects.
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