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July 23 2013

SCAPE Planning and Watch: Two years and a bit more

cbecker Characterisation, Corpora, Emulation, Identification, Migration, Preservation Risks, Preservation strategies, SCAPE 0

Now that the subproject lead in PW is being transferred from me to Kresimir, it seems a good time to reflect a little on what we have achieved in PW since February 2011 and what is left to do!

What did we set out to do?

To accomplish effective digital preservation, environments with a preservation concern such as repositories need scalable and context-aware preservation planning and monitoring capabilities to ensure continued accessibility of content over time. These should create a continuous cycle that allows the system to detect opportunities and risks and act accordingly.

So far so good. The problem is that so far, this lifecycle is not well-supported and thus hardly implemented in practice. We identified a number of gaps in the state of art that we set out to address:

Preservation environments are lacking business intelligence mechanisms and tools and the scalable feature-rich content profiling required to really understand what is in the preservation collections and what risks exist.
Knowledge sharing and discovery is not practiced at scale, since it is not supported well enough by current mechanisms.
Decision making efficiency needs to be improved (Plato is trustworthy, but requires considerable manual effort).
Policies need to be better understood and modelled, in particular preservation policies in the sense of "business policies" which guide and constraint preservation activities and provide the context of preservation planning, monitoring, and operations-

Lots of challenges! Five key goals are what we set out to achieve:

Provide a scalable mechanism to create and monitor large content profiles
Enable monitoring of operational preservation compliance, risks and opportunities
Improve efficiency of trustworthy preservation planning
Make the systems aware of their context
Design for open, loosely-coupled and robust preservation ecosystems that can grow over time

What did we achieve so far?

Our SCAPE Planning and Watch suite makes preservation planning and monitoring context-aware through a semantic representation of key organizational factors, and it collects and reasons on preservation-relevant information. Integration with repositories and external information sources provide powerful preservation capabilities that can be freely integrated with virtually any repository. Many of you already know the names of the components of that solution:

C3PO provides scalable profiling of feature-rich content collections. It takes the output of fits or tika and calculates the statistical distribution of features. It also selects representative sample objects from the collection to enable systematic experiments of more manageable size, which is important for planning, and it exports these statistics and the samples into a content profile that is understood by its partnering tools, Plato and Scout. Finally, it has an intiuitive neat user interface for visualising properties dynamically. It does not (yet?) support real-time analytics on Petabytes of data. (So far. It it would be great to make that happen too….)

Scout is the business intelligence component that draws content profiles and many other sources together to monitor what is going on in the repository – and outside! – and check whether the two are a good fit or not. C3PO and SCOUT together can already provide very useful insights to collections right now, if you use them properly. (There are still a few spaces left for the tutorial at IPRES.)

Plato, who has been around for a while, has been learning a lot about its context recently. Endowed with an understanding of the C3PO content profile and a semantic model of preservation "control policies", it is increasingly able to support the preservation planning process more efficiently. While the big improvements will be coming out in the next year, some things are already much less work than they used to be – provided you have created a "policy model" before and used C3PO to make a content profile. You can also discover Taverna workflows on myExperiment inside Plato and run them from there. That discovery function is going to get a lot more powerful in the near future, by the way… The latest release of Plato is 4.2, with more to come soon, and of course online as a service as usual since 2007.

The policy model is one of the things we will be presenting in more detail at IPRES this year (together with a demonstration of the tool suite and a tutorial on content profiling and monitoring with C3PO and SCOUT). The model represents an organisation's objectives and key contextual knowledge in a way that both Plato and SCOUT can use to provide better support for preservation planning and monitoring. A set of permanent vocabularies is out at PURL.org to provide the core elements used by the control policy model and others:

http://purl.org/DP/preservation-case contains the basic elements that link a preservation case together. This is in some cases quite closely related to preservation intent: It defines what is being preserved for whom, providing the rationale for checking whether the current state of preservation is fine or whether a plan for actions is needed.

http://purl.org/DP/quality describes the attributes to describe aspects of preservation quality,

http://purl.org/DP/quality/measures contains the elements used for annotating, describing and discovering measures for quality,

http://purl.org/DP/control-policy , finally, defines the classes of objectives relevant for a preservation case, so that goas and objectives can be defined for each case.

We expect this set of vocabularies to grow over time, naturally, both in terms of classes and their instances. It is used by the tools in different ways, providing a glue that enables them to converse with each other.

Where are we now and what is left to do?

Without trying to be complete here, some of the key things you want to know in my opinion will include that

Prototypes of all tools are out.
The APIs between these are partially published, the rest will follow soon.
We have started to measure how long it takes to create a plan and how much we can improve on that.
SCOUT already knows a number of sources to get information from (such as content profiles, PRONOM, and the policy model). Every additional source that is added makes every other source more valuable, since SCOUT can link between them. We will be developing more adaptors for additional sources, but you are very much encouraged to create adaptors too!
Documentation about the vocabulary will be out soon, and so will be further thoughts on how you can specify your policies more effectively.

Some of the upcoming things that the team in Planning and Watch is working on include

Specifying Service Level Agreements for preservation actions as part of the executable preservation plan, based on the criteria and measures created as part of planning, so that execution of the preservation plan can be monitored continuously for compliance to the expectations (after all, the choice and configuration of the action was based on experiments and measures of quality – we don’t want surprises there when we run it on lots of content!)
Sophisticated integration of Plato and Scout with myExperiment to discover components according to what they can do and what they measure, provided they are properly annotated.
Tool support for control policy editing, so you don’t need to model your policies in RDF!
A simulation engine that can be used to calculate predictions about the future state of a preservation environment, based on a current state and a set of assumptions. The neat thing here is that the entire set of assumptions is explicitly declared and documented, since this environment is built using model-driven engineering. That means that a model of the simulation, the cause-effect relationships, can be built using a domain-specific language, and that model is documented together with the simulation run, can be shared and extended, and the simulation is hence documented fully.
….. and quite a few other things that you will hear about soon!

Final APIs will be openly published to enable anybody to integrate (with) these tools.

I am very much looking forward to seeing the outcomes of the final SCAPE year!

June 17 2013

Open Research Challenges in Digital Preservation: Call for contributions!

cbecker Bit rot, Characterisation, Corpora, Database, Emulation, Identification, Migration, Preservation Risks, SCAPE, Web archiving 2

Following the community response to our workshop last year, we want to invite you again to contribute your future preservation challenge!

Digital Preservation has emerged as a key challenge for information systems in almost any domain from eCommerce and eGovernment to finance, health, and personal life. The field is increasingly recognized and has taken major strides in the last decade. However, key areas of research are often limited to applying solutions to existing problems rather than proactively investigating the challenges ahead and probing for innovative break-through approaches that would radically advance the domain.

Open Research Challenges @ IPRES 2013

To provide a forum for eliciting, discussing and refining future research challenges in digital longevity, we are organizing a half-day workshop at IPRES 2013 in Lisbon, Portugal. The goal of this interactive workshop is to elicit and discuss DP research challenges to be tackled in the next decade. It brings together researchers in order to step beyond the limitations of solutions that are applicable now, and develop concepts, models and solutions for upcoming challenges. This will cover diverse areas such as Information Systems, Databases, Information Retrieval, Library and Archival Science, Content Management, Modeling, Simulation, Human-Computer Interaction, Scholarly Communication, Systems Engineering, Cloud computing, Security and others.

The workshop builds on a highly successful first workshop last year, but focuses the discussion on specific topics and encourages participants to arrive at specific research challenges that can be tackled in concrete research designs. The output will be published as a report.

The workshop is an interactive event focusing on discussions and inspirational exchange between participants on challenging new research questions. We do not wish to prescribe topics for challenges, but encourage proposals to think outside of the box and propose challenges that lie ahead rather than research problems that are currently being tackled.

Please submit your description of a research challenge in which you

argue for the concrete motivation behind this challenge,
set it in relation to existing work,
provide a context that enables understanding and further investigation and
outline, if possible, concrete research designs to tackle the challenge.

This includes questions such as the following

Why is this topic relevant?
Why has it not been addressed yet?
What are the problems involved?
What is the potential impact if this is successfully addressed?
What are possible ways of evaluating if it has been addressed?

Format and mode of submissions

Papers must contain the sections Motivation; Current state-of-the-art; Research contributions and benefits; Outlook. Papers must be submitted in PDF format and should be 2-4 pages. They should conform to the ACM SIG template. Three to five keywords characterizing the paper should be indicated at the end of the abstract. It is expected that at least one author of each accepted challenge will register for and attend the workshop. Submissions should be sent to dpchallenges@ifs.tuwien.ac.at.

Important dates

Challenge submission deadline: July 12, 2013
Notification of acceptance: July 31, 2013
Workshop: September 6, 2013

Up-to-date information can be found at the workshop website: http://digitalpreservationchallenges.wordpress.com

June 14 2013

Preservation capabilities: How to assess? How to improve?

cbecker Characterisation, Emulation, Identification, Migration, Preservation Risks, Preservation strategies, Web archiving 0

Digital Preservation is making certain progress in terms of tool development, progressive establishment of standards and increasing activity in user communities, but there is a wide gap of approaches to systematically assess, compare and improve how organizations go about achieving their preservation goals. Some standards exist suggesting certain functional building blocks and others prescribing criteria to be met by organizations to be considered trustworthy, but there is little systematic, well-founded work on assessing organizational processes and capabilities in a transparent, comparable way.

We have recently started a project to change that.

BenchmarkDP is creating a coherent, systematic approach to assess and compare digital preservation processes, systems, and organizational capabilities. You can find information about the project at the website. As an important step, we want to engage with the community in two ways: First, we are organising a workshop at this year's IPRES, to which you are encouraged to contribute. Second, we are running a survey to assess the community's perceptions and desires with respect to assessment and improvement. The survey takes about 15-20 minutes to complete (maximum, I promise).

The goals of this survey are to analyze organizational processes and organization’s views on how to measure, assess and improve preservation processes. We solicit your opinions and priorities on the value of systematic assessment and requirements on how it would work for you.

The results of the project will be freely available, so if you are interested in improving your digital preservation capabilities, this can be the first step step to influencing the outcome. Results will be aggregated and anonymized, and results won’t be made attributable to individuals or institutions. The consultation has opened today and will close on July 26. Join your colleagues and ensure your perspective can be heard!

You can access the survey here.

Please feel very welcome to share this with colleagues who you think are interested!

Experimentation, simulation and prediction in DP: Emerging challenges

cbecker Characterisation, Corpora, Emulation, Identification, Migration, SCAPE 0

As many of you may know, Cal Lee, Andi Rauber and myself recently attempted to facilitate a broad discussion on emerging research challenges within the DP community at a workshop at IPRES 2012. We solicited – and received (thanks again to all contributors!) – wide-ranged contributions from Europe, North America, and New Zealand. The invitation was to think outside the box and to think ahead. Ten position papers were invited for presentations:

Rene van Horik: How can research data archives benefit from digital preservation research?
Peter McKinney, Lynn Benson, Steve Knight: From Hobbyist to Industrialist. Challenging the DP Community
Rainer Schmidt: Collaborative Preservation Infrastructure
Fiorella Foscarini,Gillian Oliver: The Information Culture Challenge: Moving Beyond OAIS
Claudia-Melanie Chituc: Requirements Engineering Research and Long Term Digital Preservation
Jose Borbinha: The value dimensions of Digital Preservation
Dave Tarrant: Let’s get physical!
Natasa Milic-Frayling: What is a digital object, really?
Simone Sacchi, Karen M. Wickett: Taking modeling seriously [in digital curation]
Kresimir Duretec: When is my information going to die?

These presentations set the stage for day-long intense discussions on six tables in rotating groups, involving about 60 digital preservation experts from very diverse fields. The tables were chaired by us as well as Natasa Milic-Frayling (MSR Cambridge), Rainer Schmidt (AIT), and Brian Matthews (STFC). Many thanks again to the participants and moderators for the great discussions! A report from a participant’s perspective (with lots of photographs) can be found here.

The discussion topics were intentionally broad and inclusive. The topics in particular were

Digital information models
Value, utility, cost, risk and benefit
Organizational aspects
Experimentation, simulation, and prediction
Changing paradigms, shift, evolution
Future content and the long tail

We are (still) working on a full workshop report that summarises the key discussion points for each of these tables. We are also thinking about continuing this workshop to evolve into a series, and to feed the content of the challenges into the DP? Research challenges wiki.

For now, I will report on the table I was moderating for the day. Our topic was experimentation, simulation, and prediction, which has close ties to much of the ongoing work in SCAPE, as well as a new nationally-funded project I am starting these weeks called BenchmarkDP (more on this soon). I can only give a few hints at the greatly varied strands of discussion here and hope I was able to capture some coherent views – if you were on the workshop, feel free to fill in the gaps in the comments!

The discussion started from the observation of a participant that “digital preservation is striving to become a science, yet does in large parts not yet behave like a science“. (I fully subscribe to that statement.) Taking this as a motivation, we analysed the modes and goals of experimentation, model building, simulation, prediction, and hypotheses testing as some of the key aspects that characterise systematic scientific approaches.

As an interdisciplinary field, experimentation in digital preservation will take many forms. This can range from psychological experiments on how individuals perceive difference in order to analyse the notions of authenticity and content value, as well as questions of cultural differences, to the level of large-scale simulation of automated information processes for predictive purposes, as it can be found in fields such as meteorology and physics. Clearly, the rigor that can be found in the latter is a challenging aspiration and may in fact not be an appropriate goal to strive for… Quantitative research also always needs to be embedded in a context, with a clear understanding of the stakeholders and goals.

A lot of research and development in digital preservation (and in fact a key goal of SCAPE) is focused on improving the reproducibility of experiments. This can also be seen in a number of research goals in SCAPE. However, to a large degree, experimentation in our field is still in an arts-and-craft stage or, as our colleagues from New Zealand phrased so nicely, in the “hobbyist” stage. Moving it to an “industrial” or more scientific stage requires fundamental advances. Well-founded and formally grounded verification and validation approaches are almost non-existent to date. If we aspire to “compare apples with apples”, with known variables, we need to develop a more systematic and coherent approach and address a number of key building blocks.

A clear understanding of the different levels and dimensions of experimentation is required, ranging from a micro-level of digital objects and their constituent “information elements” to the macro-level of content collections, organisations, technologies, and communities.

It is clear that the community direly misses proper frameworks for benchmarking on all of these levels. Going back to the dictionary, we see “1: usually bench mark: a mark on a permanent object indicating elevation and serving as a reference in topographic surveys and tidal observations. 2 a: a point of reference from which measurements may be made. b: something that serves as a standard by which others may be measured or judged. c: a standardized problem or test that serves as a basis for evaluation or comparison (as of computer system performance)“

Key building blocks for benchmarking hence need to include (at least)

A clear, unambiguous understanding of the processes that we want to measure,
a clear set of attributes and indicators for taking measures,
a well-defined value system for judging and assessing measures,
solid hypotheses that can be tested and falsified,
public, openly available data sets that can be shared and referenced,
ground truth that annotates these data sets with useful and trusted measures corresponding to the attributes above, where trusted at least means that we know how reliable they are (something which is almost entirely absent in the data sets currently available), and
a means for publication of benchmark results and all of the above elements.

(Please comment if you think we missed a building block in our discussion!)

A key focus today, and hence a starting point for future experimentation, is the verification of correctness of tools and processes such as migration, emulation, interpretation, characterisation, etc. This is maybe the most active area of R&D in digital preservation today. But it is hindered by a combination of barriers that still prevent us from actually having these building blocks:

There are legal constraints on sharing existing data.
It is technically challenging to develop robust benchmark data.
There are economic resource constraints on data collection, annotation, sharing, and developing systematic and coherent approaches.
There is no central reference point or body to coordinate such benchmarking.

On a specific pragmatic note, as one participant put it in the workshop, “We want carefully variant crap”, i.e. data sets of objects that are carefully designed, and thoroughly annotated, to violate specific constraints and produce specific expected behaviour. These would represent meaningful test data sets that can be used to benchmark the robustness of existing preservation tools and processes and uncover the causes of typical errors. The rationale behind such testing is that only through systematic validation, improvements can be requested, delivered, evaluated, and approved.

In the end, it is only with the above elements that we can start not just to build models, but also to systematically test and falsify them in order to enable better models. This is clearly an area of research that requires a long-term perspective, since our early models will inevitably be too crude to yield accurate and useful predictions. However, it is only through such systematic approaches that we can truly advance the state of art, rather than merely trying incremental product development and testing for immediate problem solving.

Carefully annotated test data collections, however, are just one of the building blocks of experimentation. Systematic experimentation and simulation should include (as non-exhaustive suggestions):

Loss: Can we simulate loss on different levels? How do users recognise, locate, perceive and assess loss?
Authenticity, significant properties, and equivalence: How should we conduct experiments on authenticity? Can we combine and correlate the equivalence of an “information artefact”, the meaning of an information artefact, and the representation? Can we model the cause-effect relationships between these to build predictive models?
Aging: Can we invent mechanisms for accelerated aging, mechanisms that simulate accelerated decay processes?

From the perspective of users, the predictions that would provide tremendous value include questions such as the following.

When is this object going to die?
What is the total cost of ownership (TCO) of keeping this object alive for X years?
What are the expected costs of preservation at time X?
What are the marginal costs of increasing life expectancy by X years?
At time X, will my collection be preserved successfully?
Can we simulate relationships between funding streams and project level results, enabling content holders to claim “If you cut this budget by X, object Y will be in accessible in Z years“?

An interesting comparison came up between life expectancy of digital objects and of living beings. In Actuarial Science, “actuary tables” are used to calculate life expectancy based on a number of factors. The question is: What is the equivalence of this in preservation? What are the genetic, social, economic, cultural, and other factors contributing to life expectancy? And when can we say that a piece of information is “dead”?

Obsolescence needs to be understood in a contextual form: An object is obsolete to a user if the user does not possess the means to access the content of that object at this moment. If it is possible to recover these means, the object becomes accessible to the user. The question, most of the time, will be that of the costs of doing so. Hence, we obviously have to acknowledge the limitations of such allegories. Objects aren’t really dead (usually)… or are they?

As you notice, we did not arrive at new answers, but quite a few new questions. It is clear that experimentation, simulation and prediction have yet a long way to go in this field, but also hold tremendous insights. Much more systematic approaches are required. There is a clear need to build, publish, test, and falsify models that attempt to explain the critical cause-effect relationships of the phenomena in our domain. So, off to work…

July 2 2012

Open Research Challenges in Digital Preservation

cbecker SCAPE 3

I would like to draw your attention to a workshop at IPRES on Open Research Challenges. It is a full-day workshop tentatively scheduled for October 2. The workshop builds on an earlier Dagstuhl seminar which some of you may be aware of. It is a great opportunity for discussing the next challenges ahead in digital longevity. Please spread the word and participate – and also encourage others to submit a research challenge! More information below.

*** Call for Contributions: Open Research Challenges in Digital Preservation ***

Digital Preservation has emerged as a key challenge for information systems in almost any domain from eCommerce and eGovernment to finance, health, and personal life. The field is increasingly recognised and has taken major strides in the last decade. However, key areas of research are often limited to applying solutions to existing problems rather than proactively investigating the challenges ahead and probing for innovative break-through approaches that would radically advance the domain.

Open Research Challenges @ IPRES 2012

To provide a forum for eliciting, discussing and refining future research challenges in digital longevity, we are organising a full-day workshop at IPRES 2012 in Toronto, Canada. The goal of this interactive workshop is to elicit and discuss DP research challenges to be tackled in the next decade. It brings together researchers in order to step beyond the limitations of solutions that are applicable now, and develop concepts, models and solutions for upcoming challenges. This will cover diverse areas such as Information Systems, Databases, Information Retrieval, Library and Archival Science, Content Management, Modeling, Simulation, Human-Computer Interaction, Scholarly Communication, Systems Engineering, Cloud computing, Security and others.

The workshop is an interactive event focusing on discussions and inspirational exchange between participants on challenging new research questions. To achieve this goal, we follow the model of the Dagstuhl seminar on Automation in Digital Preservation held in 2010.

We do not wish to prescribe topics for challenges, but encourage proposals to think outside of the box and propose challenges that lie ahead rather than research problems that are currently being tackled.

Please submit your description of a research challenge in which you

argue for the concrete motivation behind this challenge,
set it in relation to existing work and
provide a context that enables understanding and further investigation.

This includes questions such as the following

Why is this topic relevant?
Why has it not been addressed yet?
What are the problems involved?
What is the potential impact if this is successfully addressed?

Format and mode of submissions

Papers should be submitted in PDF format and should be 2-4 pages. They should conform to the ACM SIG template. Three to five keywords characterizing the paper should be indicated at the end of the abstract. It is expected that at least one author of each accepted challenge will register for and attend the workshop. Submissions should be sent to dpchallenges@ifs.tuwien.ac.at.

Important dates

Challenge submission deadline: September 5, 2012 (EXTENDED)
Notification of acceptance: September 10, 2012
Workshop: October 2, 2012

Up-to-date information can be found at the workshop website: http://digitalpreservationchallenges.wordpress.com

With best regards, the workshop chairs:
Christoph Becker
Andreas Rauber
Christopher (Cal) Lee

February 16 2012

SCAPE Planning and Watch: The first year

cbecker SCAPE 0

In my previous post, I tried to give a quick overview on Planning and Watch in SCAPE. Here I will shortly outline our main streams of work and summarise some of the achievements to report.

Our key goal is scalability, but one title we sometimes use for this subproject is “Context-aware planning and watch”. It points to the obvious truth that planning should never operate in a vacuum, but instead operates in the context of evolving drivers, constraints, ends and means: Content, users, technologies, policies, legal obligations, format risks… everything can change over time. This means we need awareness of the organisation’s context and policies.

The work package “Policy Representation” will develop ways to represent such context so that planning and monitoring activities can reason on contextual factors. Examples that will directly drive planning and watch processes include (for example!) access requirements, format risks, and significant property specifications.

The work package Automated Watch has the primary goal of developing a monitoring system that continuously gathers information from a variety of information sources. It will allow other systems and persons to sign up for notification events when certain conditions are met. For example, it will collect content profiles and monitor how they evolve, and allow an organisation to receive a notification when the organisation is the last known organisation holding content in a certain format. But it will allow quite a bit more of sophisticated monitoring. If you are interested, please take a look at the report on Watch component design. The work package also develops a simulation environment that can be used to make predictions and simulate the effects of operations over time.

Finally, the work package Automated Planning is working towards increasing the automation available for preservation planning by integrating automated features and services and making the planning process policy-aware. As discussed, planning now is complex and effort-intensive; this work package will change this quite substantially.

Where are we now in these work streams? To know it all, you will have to read the reports and stay tuned… but I will try to make your choice of reading a bit easier here 😉 so here are some of our most interesting results so far:

1. Lessons learned in Preservation Planning

A number of serious preservation planning case studies have been conducted during and after the PLANETS project, with and without support from the core Plato team. In SCAPE, we took a close look and spent quite a while analysing the data of these studies and the experiences gained. Some of the key conclusions of this analysis are outlined in our JCDL article.

2. Decision factors in planning

In planning, you have to evaluate potential preservation actions against your requirements. That includes defining a number of specific decision criteria that are driving the evaluation. We analysed hundreds of decision criteria from more than a dozen case studies, categorised them, mapped them to established quality models and discussed how to measure the different kinds of criteria so that evaluation and decision making is based on real measures instead of vague judgements or industry averages. Our article in JASIST discusses the measurement side of things and the distribution of criteria across different groups.

Now this is quite interesting in itself, but does not tell us how important decision criteria are: If I have created a plan using 35 critera that I considered in my decision, which of these were actually the critical ones? What if I evaluated this one incorrectly? What are the most critical aspects across multiple organisations? How much of a decision about image migration is typically driven by considerations about the target formats?

To answer questions like these, Markus built a tool that he calls the “Knowledge Browser”. It quantifies the impact of decision criteria and can show you what effect different measures have in the real world: It computes impact factors for criteria such as “Average relative filesize resulting from a migration” or “Compound impact of all format-related decision criteria in case studies on images”, all based on real-world case studies from Plato’s knowledge base. In his IPRES article and the SCAPE deliverable D14.1, he discusses the methods and techniques behind this and summarises results. The knowledge browser itself will be part of the new release of Plato, version 4, which we are currently developing. That means that soon you will be able to analyse the importance of decision criteria in real-time, based on (anonymised) decisions taken within the community.

3. A fully automated planning experiment

Trustworthy Planning means that we have to verify every aspect of preservation actions against dozens of criteria using controlled experimentation on sample content. This is not easy if done manually, so of course we want to automate the experimentation to achieve scalability. The preservation components sub project is developing key components for this purpose, in particular Quality Assurance components that verify the results of migration actions.

One preservation planning experiment consists of a number of components put together: For migration, for example, we need to analyse the properties of the sample content (Characterisation), carry out the preservation action we want to evaluate and measure its performance, analyse the output (Characterisation), compare the original and the output (Quality Assurance) and document the results. The resulting measures can then be fed back into planning for analysis and decisions.

From the side of planning, we put together an experiment where every important decision criterion that has to be validated in an experiment is in fact measured automatically. The experiment design focuses on born-digital raw photographs, which present quite a challenge: Each photograph combines raw sensor data with development settings that work much like an analog negative film that is chemically developed to yield a photographic print. A change in the development parameters produces completely different outputs. The main challenge is Quality Assurance for converting proprietary raw photograph formats to the standard Adobe Digital Negative (DNG). Our preliminary results are discussed in this paper published at ICADL 2011, and we have since then worked on combining all these elements using a Taverna workflow that can be called from Plato. More on this soon!

4. Decision making and governance

Scalable control requires standardised governance processes. In collaboration with the SHAMAN project, we have looked at decision making and governance processes and suggested a path to integrating preservation planning and operations into the leading IT Governance framework COBIT. We also developed a simple Capability Maturity Model for Preservation Planning and Operations that shows how operations, control and monitoring fit together and how an organisation can assess and improve their capabilities systematically. These are discussed in articles at ASIST-AM 2011 and IPRES 2011.

5. Automated Monitoring: The Preservation Watch component

Since many factors can change over time in a preservation environment, we need a mechanism to gather information, monitor changes, and react to them in time. These means we need internal and external monitoring capabilities: Internal Monitoring is the ability to monitor operations for certain properties of interest, which include operations specified by plans and operational attributes of the system. External Monitoring is the ability to monitor external influencers of interest. The key goals of the Watch component are:

1. Enable the planning component to automatically monitor entities and properties of interest

2. Enable human users and software components to pose questions about entities and properties of interest

3. Collect information from different sources through adaptors

4. Act as a central place for collecting relevant knowledge that could be used to preserve an object or a collection

5. Enable human users to add specific knowledge

6. Notify interested agents when an important event occurs

7. Act as an extensible component. This last item is particularly important: The Watch component is intended to function as a platform where additional information sources can be connected easily.

All these goals and concepts are detailed and illustrated in much more detail in the latest report on the Watch component architecture, together with a high-level design of the system as we are starting to develop it. The first release of the Watch component is scheduled for this year (2012).

It seems I failed one goal with this post: to “shortly” outline the results… apologies, there’s just too much to report! 😉

Happy planning,

Christoph

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