Download Abstract - TU Wien

Abstract:
Communicating with the Future:
Challenges and Solutions in Digital Preservation
Increasing amounts of information are being created and maintained in digital form.
This includes objects from virtually every discipline and type, such as e.g. office
documents and email communication, government records, simulations, scientific
datasets, photos and videos, computer games and digital art, social networks and all
kinds of applications in the form of software and hardware.
Many of these objects need to be preserved and maintained accessible over long
periods of time, be it out of legal requirements, because they form the basis of
business models, because they constitute valuable cultural heritage, because we
need them as evidence and proof of scientific experiments, or because of personal
reasons and value.
Yet, contrary to conventional objects, digital one are very fragile. While we can open
and maybe be able to read a manuscript that is several hundred years old, trying to
access a spreadsheet from the early eighties may turn out to be almost impossible.
Digital objects may be stored on media for which no reading devices are available
anymore. Even if we can read the bits from the data carrier, digital objects need
specific programs to open and render them. These, in turn, need specific libraries
and a suitable operating system, which in turn only runs on specific hardware with
drivers for specific devices. If any of these is not available, a digital object is nothing
but a series of 0's and 1's.
Digital Preservation aims at maintaining digital objects accessible in an authentic
form over long periods of time. This talk will review some of the core challenges in
this endeavour and show potential solutions. It will touch on the OAIS reference
model, an ISO standard for an open archival information system, and focus
particularly on issues of preservation planning to achieve a trustable digital archive,
pointing at numerous open research issues.
Bio:
Andreas Rauber is Associate Professor at the Department of Software Technology
and Interactive Systems (ifs) at the Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien). He
furthermore is president of AARIT, the Austrian Association for Research in IT.
He received his MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the Vienna University of
Technology in 1997 and 2000, respectively. In 2001 he joined the National Research
Council of Italy (CNR) in Pisa as an ERCIM Research Fellow, followed by an ERCIM
Research position at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science
and Control (INRIA), at Rocquencourt, France, in 2002. From 2004-2008 he was also
head of the iSpaces research group at the eCommerce Competence Center (ec3).
In 1998 he received the ÖGAI Award of the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence
(ÖGAI), and the Cor-Baayen Award of the European Research Consortium for
Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) in 2002. He is a member of the Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM), The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(IEEE), the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ÖGAI). He also serves on the
board of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries (TCDL).
He is actively involved in several research projects in the field of Digital Libraries,
focusing on the organization and exploration of large information spaces, as well as
Web archiving and digital preservation.