Information System Agnostic Ancestry for Digital Objects

More and more information is becoming available in digital form, most of it derived from digital sources. Digital information is made available as digital objects composed of a sequence of bits and managed by information systems. To date, these digital objects have no independent identification which can be refered outside of a specific information system. However, they normally outlive these systems and can be copied to other systems. In order for the ancestry of digital information to span more than one generation, each source, and therefore each digital object, must provide information on its ancestry. This information needs to be accessible independent of a specific information system. In this thesis, we present the theoretical foundation for the identification of digital objects independent of information systems and for enhancing digital objects with ancestry information.