Invest to Save: Report and Recommendations of the NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation

Digital archiving and preservation are important areas for research and development, but there is no agreed upon set of priorities or coherent plan for research in this area. Research projects in this area tend to be small and driven by particular institutional problems or concerns. As a consequence, proposed solutions from experimental projects and prototypes tend not to scale to millions of digital objects, nor do the results from disparate projects readily build on each other. It is also unclear whether it is worthwhile to seek general solutions or whether different strategies are needed for different types of digital objects and collections. The lack of coordination in both research and development means that there are some areas where researchers are reinventing the wheel while other areas are neglected. Digital archiving and preservation is an area that will benefit from an exercise in analysis, priority setting, and planning for future research. The WG aims to survey current research activities, identify gaps, and develop a white paper proposing future research directions in the area of digital preservation. Some of the potential areas for research include repository architectures and inter-operability among digital archives; automated tools for capture, ingest, and normalization of digital objects; and harmonization of preservation formats and metadata. There can also be opportunities for development of commercial products in the areas of mass storage systems, repositories and repository management systems, and data management software and tools.

Wilkins Hill and the art of hermeneutical uncertainty

This article discusses the Neo-Conceptual Installation Art of Wendy Wilkins and Wes Hill, Brisbane-based artists currently residing in Berlin. The article discusses their conceptual development and their place within the art-world context

A semantic web approach for built heritage representation

In a built heritage process, meant as a structured system of activities aimed at the investigation, preservation, and management of architectural heritage, any task accomplished by the several actors involved in it is deeply influenced by the way the knowledge is represented and shared. In the current heritage practice, knowledge representation and management have shown several limitations due to the difficulty of dealing with large amount of extremely heterogeneous data. On this basis, this research aims at extending semantic web approaches and technologies to architectural heritage knowledge management in order to provide an integrated and multidisciplinary representation of the artifact and of the knowledge necessary to support any decision or any intervention and management activity. To this purpose, an ontology-based system, representing the knowledge related to the artifact and its contexts, has been developed through the formalization of domain-specific entities and relationships between them

Digital Preservation Services : State of the Art Analysis

Research report funded by the DC-NET project.An overview of the state of the art in service provision for digital preservation and curation. Its focus is on the areas where bridging the gaps is needed between e-Infrastructures and efficient and forward-looking digital preservation services. Based on a desktop study and a rapid analysis of some 190 currently available tools and services for digital preservation, the deliverable provides a high-level view on the range of instruments currently on offer to support various functions within a preservation system.European Commission, FP7peer-reviewe

KAPTUR: exploring the nature of visual arts research data and its effective management.

KAPTUR (2011-2013), funded by JISC and led by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), is a highly collaborative project involving four institutional partners: the Glasgow School of Arts; Goldsmiths, University of London; University for the Creative Arts; and the University of the Arts London. The preservation and publication of research data is seen as positive and all UK Research Councils now require it as a condition of funding (RCUK 2012). As a result a network of data repositories are emerging (DataCite 2012a), some funded by Research Councils, others by institutions themselves. However, research data management practice within the visual arts appears ad hoc. None of the specialist arts institutions within the UK has implemented research data management policies (DCC 2011a), nor established research data management systems. KAPTUR seeks to investigate the nature of visual arts research data, making recommendations for its effective management; develop a model of best practice applicable to both specialist arts institutions and arts departments in multidisciplinary institutions; and apply, test and refine the model with the four institutional partners. This paper will explore the nature of visual arts research data and how effective data management can ensure its long term usage, curation and preservation

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Study on the use of metadata for digital learning objects in university institutional repositories (MODERI)

Metadata is a core issue for the creation of repositories. Different institutional repositories have chosen and use different metadata models, elements and values for describing the range of digital objects they store. Thus, this paper analyzes the current use of metadata describing those Learning Objects that some open higher educational institutions' repositories include in their collections. The goal of this work is to identify and analyze the different metadata models being used to describe educational features of those specific digital educational objects (such as audience, type of educational object, learning objectives, etc.). Also discussed is the concept and typology of Learning Objects (LO) through their use in University Repositories. We will also examine the usefulness of specifically describing those learning objects, setting them apart from other kind of documents included in the repository, mainly scholarly publications and research results of the Higher Education institution.En prens