Emulation is getting more and more relevant in digital preservation and thus got its first full-day workshop at this years iPRES in Toronto on 1st October. While emulation is now widely accepted as a necessary access strategy, mature software frameworks and workflows are still missing. The workshop provides the opportunity to present latest research results, status quo of emulation application and use cases. It is intended to provide an additional forum for experts in emulation alongside the main conference to discuss current trends, today’s strategies and formulate future implementation and research agendas. Content holders will be given a platform to describe their challenges with complex data-objects to align research with practical problems. The workshop will be split into two sessions, the first giving a broad overview on the field and summarize the state-of-the-art through short presentations from three domains: technical research in emulation, ongoing projects, and current challenges. The second will extend upon this by structuring and prioritizing the future research agenda and implementation of tools.
Registration and Submission
- Either a description of a use case for which you intend to/already use emulation to solve a problem and would like to get input from colleagues working in emulation
- A description of your current ongoing scientific research related to emulation
- Submission of the extended abstract to emulationws2012@rz.uni-freiburg.de
Topics
We intend to discuss topics from two relevant domains: Solutions, Research Concepts and Prototypes andUse-Cases and Requirements. The first strand will deal with public and private sector research in the area of emulation.
- Definition, creation of work flows to enrich necessary meta data and usage information
- Frameworks for emulation based preservation and access work flows
- Meta data for emulation work flows
- Automation of emulation aspects
- This subtopic will discuss prerequisites and requirements for fully automated services operating in large scale environments. Those include the replacement of user interaction by using standard interfacing protocol
- Migration-by-emulation
- Automatic configuration of environments
- Automated create-view
- System imaging and digital forensics
- Resilient and sustainable business systems
- Quality assurance of tools and work flows
- Test sets and environments, automated testing
- Evaluation of digital object behaviour in original and emulated environments
The second strand focuses on existing implementations, work flows, integration and practical challenges.
- Different approaches to emulation and emulation frameworks: This subtopic should provide an overview on existing production and prototypes in use or researched at the moment.
- Examples for application of emulation strategy
- Complete system archiving
- Databases and frontends
- Access environments to web-arched artefacts
- Computer games
- Emulation enhanced reading room systems
- Sustainable / preservation aware emulators
- Technology change, market forces versus long-term sustainability
- Open Source approach to emulator development and maintenance with a commercial service
- Future emulator requirements and APIs for framework integration, measurements
- Discuss standardization in emulation and virtualization
- Extended concepts of traditional object life cycle management through system design
- Legal issues when dealing with emulators, secondary software objects, copy protection
- Software archiving for secondary objects and system imaging
Program
The workshop program will be made available before the conference after receiving all submissions. It is intended as a highly interactive event. Classic presentations of slides etc. will be reduced to a minimum. Participants presenting research or practical results are bound to strict time limits of 5-10 minutes and therefore have to focus on their main achievements or open problems. Based on the presentations small groups will be formed to work out future requirements for emulation in productive DP environments and discuss the challenges of the content holding institutions.
