David Giaretta

Primary Trustworthy Digital Repository Authorisation Body Ltd and Giaretta Associated Ltd

As information and communication technology has become pervasive in our society, we are increasingly dependent on both digital data and repositories that provide access to and enable the use of such resources. Repositories must earn the trust of the communities they intend to serve and demonstrate that they are reliable and capable of appropriately...

The aim of this paper is to describe and explain the most significant updates which have been made to the version 2 OAIS [1], which was published in 2012, from the point of view of the authors, who have all been deeply involved with the revision. These updates resulted in a draft which, at the time of writing, is the text to be submitted for Consul...

Archiving models employed in Multi-disciplinary Earth System Science research tend to be very heterogeneous, as recognized by the “Variability” Aspect of the common Big Data “Four V” definition. The information being preserved is at constant risk of obsolescence due to continuous technology and community knowledge changes and development. Accessing...

The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, published as ISO 14721, has been adopted as the “de facto” standard for systems that preserve data. ISO 16363, the standard for Audit And Certification Of Trustworthy Digital Repositories, is based on ISO 14721 and contains the criteria for auditing various kinds of repositories in terms...

The SCIDIP-ES project provides an e-infrastructure to support long-term preservation and use of the knowledge encoded in scientific data. The infrastructure offers a set of generic, sustainable services and toolkits based on the CASPAR prototypes to support efficient preservation planning and management along with usability and access needs. The SC...

The capability for long term preservation of earth science data is a key requirement to support on-going research and collaboration within and between many earth science disciplines. A number of critically important current research directions (e.g. understanding climate change, and ensuring sustainability of natural resources) rely on the preserva...

The capability for long term preservation of earth science data is a key requirement to support on-going research and collaboration within and between many earth science disciplines. A number of critically important current research directions (e.g. understanding climate change, and ensuring sustainability of natural resources) rely on the preserva...

To preserve digitally encoded information over a long term following the OAIS Reference Model requires that the information remains accessible, understandable and usable by a specified Designated Community. These are significant challenges for repositories. It will be argued that infrastructure which is needed to support this preservation must be s...

The proper preservation of both the current and historical scientific data will underpin a multitude of ecological, economic and political decisions in the future of our society. The SCIDIP-ES project addresses the long-term persistent storage, access and management needs of scientific data by providing preservation infrastructure services. Taking...

This document is a technical Recommended Practice for use in developing a broader consensus on what is required for an archive to provide permanent, or indefinite Long Term, preservation of digital information. This Recommended Practice establishes a common framework of terms and concepts which make up an Open Archival Information System (OAIS). It...

Network modelling provides a framework for the systematic analysis of needs and options for preservation. A number of general strategies can be identified, characterised and applied to many situations; these strategies may be combined to produce robust preservation solutions tailored to the needs of the community and responsive to their environment...

Science data digital repositories are entrusted to ensure that a science community's data are available and useful to users both today and in the future. Part of the challenge in meeting this responsibility is identifying the standards, policies and procedures required to accomplish effective data preservation. Subsequently a repository should be e...

The challenge of digital preservation of scientific data lies in the need to preserve not only the dataset itself but also the ability it has to deliver knowledge to a future user community. A true scientific research asset allows future users to reanalyze the data within new contexts. Thus, in order to carry out meaningful preservation we need to...

This document describes the structures making up the version 1.2 of the VOTable standard, which supersedes the version 1.1 of 08 August 2004. The differences between versions 1.1 and 1.2 are summarized in the last section. The main part of this document describes the adopted part of the VOTable standard; it is followed by appendices presenting exte...

……….enough of it, and for an indefinite period. If this cannot be guaranteed then the rest of this book will be essential for you.

We begin with a brief recap of the points made in Chap. 5 about the broad threats to the preservation of our digitally encoded information. Then a number of components, both infrastructure and domain dependent, are discussed and the CASPAR implementations of these are introduced. Subsequent chapters build up the details of the infrastructure and to...

Since the 1970s, the field of performance arts has quickly evolved thanks to the development of, and innovation in computers, software and electronic devices that have transformed stage practices. Whereas performers used hardware devices for all signal processing required on stage, they progressively moved to software environments enabling them to...

OAIS describes packaging at a high level, as outlined in Sect. 6.3.4, where it is stressed that the package is a logical structure, i.e. does not have to be a single file. Despite stressing the logical structure, it can be useful to package digital objects – let’s say files – together in a single file, for example a ZIP [142] file. However if one s...

So far we have used the OAIS terminology for digital preservation . Now we turn to a complementary way of looking at it. We can say that the challenge of digital preservation of scientific data lies in the need to preserve not only the dataset itself but also the ability it has to deliver knowledge to a future user community. This entails allowing...

One important consideration is the preservability of the infrastructure components (Fig. 17.1) themselves. The approach taken by CASPAR was not to use recursion and say that one would use CASPAR to preserve the components. Instead the approach was to make the components relatively easy to re-implement. Thus in the rest of this chapter we provide mo...

The Preserving Digital Information report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information [243] declared, a critical component of digital archiving infrastructure is the existence of a sufficient number of trusted organizations capable of storing, migrating, and providing access to digital collections. process of certification for digital arc...

After reading Part I of this book the reader should have a better idea of the variety of types of digital objects which may need to be preserved, and some of the challenges which will need to be addressed. In particular the reader should be armed with most of the key questions which need to be asked about the digital object to be preserved and the...

Preservation Description Information , as defined by OAIS as being made up of several types of Information (Fig. 10.1): Fixity, Reference, Context Provenance and Access Rights, will be detailed below. Note that Access Rights Information was not in the original version of OAIS but was added in the first update.

OAIS is not a design; its lack of specificity gives it wide applicability and great strength but it also forces implementers to make choices, among which is the level of application of the OAIS concepts. In this chapter we look particularly at Representation Information

The concepts introduced here are aimed at providing an infrastructure which can be shared across the widest range of information. In that way we can spread the cost and effort of preservation and reduce the risk that the infrastructure upon which we would depend might itself disappear by broadening its potential support.

There are some obvious threats to the preservation of digitally encoded information. One is what one might call “bit rot” i.e. the deterioration in our ability to read the bits in which the information is encoded. While this is fundamental, nevertheless there are an increasing number of ways to overcome this problem, the simplest of which is replic...

We base the requirements for the preservation/re-use/access infrastructure on a broad analysis of the threats and an initial set of solutions

There are a number of basic preservation strategies upon which one can build more complex strategies. These are the ones which are described explicitly or implicitly by OAIS , based around ensuring that the digital object will be usable and understandable to the Designated Community . Of course one also has to maintain the trail of information to s...

Much has been written about Authenticity . However in order to create tools which can be relied upon and which are practical we must achieve the following

Ensuring that digitally encoded information remains usable and understandable over time is, together with authenticity , at the heart of digital preservation . The previous chapter discussed some of the formal aspects of intelligibility. This chapter discusses the complementary issue of usability of the data.

We live in a digital world. Everyone nowadays works and communicates using computers. We communicate digitally using e-mails and voice platforms, watch photographs in digital form, use computers for complex computations and experiments. Moreover information that previously existed in analogue form (i.e. in paper) is now digitized. The amount of dig...

It is impossible to give an exhaustive list of types of digital objects, yet it is useful to remind ourselves of at least some of the great variety that we must be able to deal with. By types we mean not just different formats, but rather different classifications.

In this part of the book we show a number of real examples of digital preservation activities; these have been chosen to illustrate a number of scenarios and preservation strategies using a great variety of types of data, from the simplest to highly complex.

The selected ESA scientific dataset consists of data from GOME (Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment), a sensor on board ESA ERS-2 (European Remote Sensing) satellite, which has been in operation since 1995.

The bulk of the rest of Part II concerns the testbed reports which provide “accelerated lifetime” tests for a variety of datasets over a number of disciplines.

The concept of cultural heritage has a wide range of applications: museums, books and libraries, paintings, etc. It also includes monuments, archaeological sites, etc. The CASPAR project we used the definition of Cultural Heritage given in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention (UNESCO, 1972)

Several datasets are used in four scenarios in order to illustrate a number of important points. The datasets come from the archives located in STFC acquired from instruments in other locations, illustrated in Fig. 19.1, and for the study the MST radar in Wales (Fig. 19.2) and Ionosonde data from many stations around the world.

A number of OAIS [4] concepts were introduced in Chap. 3. In this chapter we delve somewhat deeper. The OAIS standard (ISO 14721) serves several different purposes. Its fundamental purpose is to provide concepts that can guide digital preservation . Using these concepts a number of conformance requirements, including mandatory responsibilities, are...

Another way of looking at this is to realise that different people have slightly different definitions in mind, depending upon their backgrounds, for many common terms. If we are not careful we will talk at cross-purposes because of these differences. In order to avoid this we need clear definitions. The next few sections discuss some of the basic...

This paper provides an overview of the needs and threats for digital preservation and summarizes the findings from project PARSE.Insight. This project, co-funded by the EU, contains one of the first large worldwide surveys about digital preservation including most players of the STM information chain: researchers, libraries, data managers, publishe...

There is growing recognition of the need to address the fragility of digital information, on which our society heavily depends for smooth operation in all aspects of daily life. This has been discussed in many books and articles on digital preservation, so why is there a need for yet one more? Because, for the most part, those other publications fo...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of XML formatted data unit (XFDU) technology to implement OAIS‐based information packaging in the CASPAR project. Design/methodology/approach The paper outlines new tools and techniques in working with XFDU for the purpose of preserving complex digital information. Findings The preservation...

The presentation in point reports on the topic of long term availability of environmental data as perceived by the Earth Science data user community. In the context of the European strategy for preserving Earth Observation (EO) data and as partner of the EU FP7 PARSE.Insight project (http://www.parse-insight.eu/), the European Space Agency (ESA) is...

The importance and magnitude of the problem facing society about preserving our digitally encoded intellectual and cultural capital is not in doubt. However, there are a number of fundamental challenges which must be overcome in order to provide adequate solutions. This paper will describe the progress which has been made so far in solving these ch...

To preserve digitally encoded information over a long term following the OAIS Reference Model requires that the information remains accessible, understandable and usable by a specified Designated Community. These are significant challenges for repositories. It will be argued that infrastructure which is needed to support this preservation must be s...

ESA-ESRIN, the European Space Agency Centre for Earth Observation (EO), is the largest European EO data provider and operates as the reference European centre for EO payload data exploitation. EO Space Missions provide global coverage of the Earth across both space and time generating on a routine continuous basis huge amounts of data (from a varie...

Reusable high quality data are emerging as the raw material of contemporary e-science. Large volumes of scientific data are now ¿born-digital¿ and need to be curated to facilitate use and reuse. Representation Information (RI) as defined by the OAIS Reference Model is increasingly recognised as being vital to the long term curation and preservation...

Interactive multimedia and human-computer interaction technologies are effecting and contributing towards a wide range of developments in many different subject areas including contemporary performing arts. These technologies have facilitated the developments and advancements of augmented and virtual instruments for interactive music performance, i...

The concept of Significant Properties is one which has been much discussed within the preservation community as a way of characterising the essential features of a digital object which must be maintained over time. However, the term Significant Properties has been given a variety of definitions and used in various ways over the past several years....

Interactive multimedia and human-computer interaction technologies are effecting and contributing towards a wide range of developments in all subject areas including contemporary performing arts. These include augmented instruments for interactive music performance, installation arts and technology-enhanced learning. Consequently, the preservation...

To preserve digitally encoded information over the long term following the OAIS Reference Model requires that this information remains accessible, understandable and usable by a specified Designated Community. These are significant challenges for repositories, particularly when dealing with scientific data where the semantics must be associated wit...

From the earliest discussions of concerns about the preservability of digital objects there have been calls for some way of judging the quality of digital repositories. In the past few years the NARA/RLG group has produced the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification: Criteria and Checklist (TRAC) document. A number of other closed national...

Meaningful preservation of scientific data is that which permits reuse. This is frequently dependent on a number of digital objects and sources of information which will have been subjected to preservation action such as format conversion or the addition of representation information. A future user may be required to interact with a number of unfam...

The need to address the fragility of the digital information collected in artistic activities is urgently emerging and increasing. This need is particularly heightened by new multimedia technologies that support the artistic community with many different forms of digital means. The present work concerns an ontology layering architecture for organiz...

A description of some of the fundamental concepts in CASPAR as well as the metrics by which CASPAR believes that it, and other projects which claim to aid the practice of digital preservation, should be judged.

As the world becomes digital, we are in ever greater danger of losing business, scientific, artistic, cultural, and personal assets. The threat of such a digital dark age stems from the fact that— unlike physical records that may survive decades, centuries, or even longer without advanced planning—digital records will not survive without planning a...

With the advancements in human-computer interaction and related technologies, such as motion capture, sensor interface and analysis, interactive multimedia performances are rapidly gaining ground within the performing arts communities. This has brought forward the need for digital preservation of these performances, so that they can be reconstructe...

2008

Preservation of Interactive Multimedia Performances (IMPs) is becoming important, as they are getting more and more popular in the performing arts communities. Preservation requires keeping not only all the necessary components for the production of a performance but also the knowledge about these components so that the original production process...

Data is valuable, expensive to create, and may be impossible to re-create, so who can be trusted to look after it in the long term? This is a question which applies to all the types of digital data on which most astronomical research, and much of the rest of civilisation, depends. This talk will outline the work which has been, and continues to be...

The volumes of digital information are growing continuously and most of today's information is "born digital". Alongside this trend, business, scientific, artistic and cultural needs require much of this information to be kept for decades, centuries or longer. The convergence of these two trends implies the need for storage systems that support ver...

Preservation of interactive multimedia performances is becoming important as they are getting more and more popular in performing arts com- munities. A proper preservation does not only require keeping all the necessary components available at the time of reconstruction but also the knowledge about these components are assembled together for in per...

Interactive multimedia performances are rapidly gaining ground within performing arts communities nowadays, mainly due to breakthroughs in human- computer interaction technologies, such as human motion capture and analysis. This has brought forward the issue of digital preservation of these performances, so that they can be reconstructed in the fut...

The VOTable format is now an agreed upon XML standard for representing tabular data in the VO context. Tabular data are an important part of the data exchanged between all participants in the Virtual Observatory: such representations include data extracted from catalogues and surveys, calibration parameters and data, results of modelling applicatio...

Most of the systems currently used to analyze astronomical data were designed and implemented more than a decade ago. Although they still are very useful for analysis, one often would like a better interface to newer concepts like archives, Virtual Observatories and GRID. Further, incompatibilities between most of the current systems with respect t...

Various recent changes to the software produced by Starlink are demonstrated. These cover areas such as table handling, time-series analysis, pipeline processing, astrometric calibration, spectral and cube visualisation, and ports to the Mac OS X and Cygwin environments. Particular emphasis was given to the applicability to the Virtual Observatory.

The OAIS reference model provides an internationally recognised framework for long-term preservation of information. A fundamental role is played by the information model which defines representation information. We argue that representation information is a key concept both for the preservation of digital information as well as interoperability in...

We describe the aims and aspirations for the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), the UK response to the realisation that digital information is both essential and fragile. We recognise the equivalence of preservation as "interoperability with the future", asserting that digital curation is concerned with "communication across time". We see the DCC as ha...