Scalable decision support for digital preservation

Abstract

Abstract:Purpose -Preservation environments such as repositories need scalable and context-aware preservation planning and monitoring capabilities to ensure continued accessibility of content over time. This article identifies a number of gaps in the systems and mechanisms currently available, and presents a new, innovative architecture for scalable decision making and control in such environments.Design/methodology/approach -The paper illustrates the state of the art in preservation planning and monitoring, highlights the key challenges faced by repositories to provide scalable decision making and monitoring facilities, and presents the contributions of the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite to provide such capabilities.Findings -The presented architecture makes preservation planning and monitoring context-aware through a semantic representation of key organizational factors, and integrates this with a business intelligence system that collects and reasons upon preservation-relevant information.Research limitations/implications -The architecture has been implemented in the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite. Integration with repositories and external information sources provide powerful preservation capabilities that can be freely integrated with virtually any repository.Practical implications -The open nature of the software suite enables stewardship organizations to integrate the components with their own preservation environments and to contribute to the ongoing improvement of the systems.Originality/value -The paper reports on innovative research and development to provide preservation capabilities. The results enable proactive, continuous preservation management through a context-aware planning and monitoring cycle integrated with operational systems.

Scalable decision support for digital preservation: an assessment

“…This section discussed each of the key design goals of the architecture and system presented in Becker et al (2014) and conducted a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the key objectives for each of the goals. We showed that the system significantly improves on the existing state of art in digital preservation by combining a context-aware business intelligence support tool with a scalable mechanism for content profiling, both integrated with a successor of the standard preservation planning tool Plato that is showing substantial efficiency gains over previous solutions.…”

“…The modular approach of the semantic models has been discussed in Becker et al (2014). A detailed documentation of the model is provided in (Kulovits et al 2013).…”

“…While some of the questions that are raised by the design goals discussed in Becker et al (2014) can be readily evaluated using standard metrics, others require a detailed qualitative assessment. This section will discuss how to systematically assess improvements on the dimensions of trust and scalability.…”

“…Considering the preservation lifecycle outlined in Becker et al (2014), what does the availability of the described system mean for an organization that has content and a preservation mandate, has set up a reasonable organizational structure and defined corresponding responsibilities, but has not yet ventured to create and maintain specific, actionable preservation plans? The exact measures to be taken will certainly depend on the specific institutional context, but essentially, such an organization can follow a series of steps.…”

“…This article continues the discussion in Becker et al (2014) and presents a systematic assessment and evaluation of the SCAPE decision support environment comprising PLATO, SCOUT and c3po. We discuss the improvements and identified limitations of the presented system.…”