Linked Open Data for Digital Video Formats

Digital moving images consist of bitmap digital images or “frames” displayed in rapid succession at a constant rate, giving the appearance of movement. Digital Video is an electronic representation of moving images in the form of encoded digital data. The information is made up of a sequence of data rather than as a continuous signal. Digital video is defined as a video stream that has been created as, or converted into, digital form encoded as numerical samples in continuous sequence. Each frame is comprised of a series of pixels with resolution determined by the relative number of pixels in a frame (SD, HD, UHD). Digital video formats are generally composed of both a wrapper format, usually the common name associated with the file extension, and an encoding method or codec.

The significant properties of digital video records are documented in the Digital Video Preservation Plan, which can be used as test criteria for tools and processes used in format transformations. 

NARA makes its Linked Open Data available in Resource Description Framework Terse RDF Triple Language or RDF Turtle (.ttl files). These files can be opened in any text editor. The Digital Preservation Framework as Linked Open Data includes the same elements as are available in the version of the Preservation Plans on GitHub.

These plans are not exhaustive nor universally applicable proposed actions and recommended or endorsed tools: these represent file formats and variant versions in NARA holdings, the current NARA risk assessment, processing capabilities, and tools in use at NARA.