13,998 research outputs found
Digital Preservation, Archival Science and Methodological Foundations for Digital Libraries
Digital libraries, whether commercial, public or personal, lie at the heart of the information society. Yet, research into their longâterm viability and the meaningful accessibility of their contents remains in its infancy. In general, as we have pointed out elsewhere, âafter more
than twenty years of research in digital curation and preservation the actual theories, methods and technologies that can either foster or ensure digital longevity remain
startlingly limited.â Research led by DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) and the Digital
Preservation Cluster of DELOS has allowed us to refine the key research challenges â theoretical, methodological and technological â that need attention by researchers in digital libraries during the coming five to ten years, if we are to ensure that the materials held in our emerging digital libraries are to remain sustainable, authentic, accessible and understandable over time. Building on this work and taking the theoretical framework of archival science as bedrock, this paper investigates digital preservation and its foundational role if digital libraries are to have longâterm viability at the centre of the
global information society.
Economics and Engineering for Preserving Digital Content
Progress towards practical long-term preservation seems to be stalled. Preservationists cannot afford specially developed technology, but must exploit what is created for the marketplace.
Economic and technical facts suggest that most preservation ork should be shifted from repository institutions to information producers and consumers. Prior publications describe solutions for all known conceptual challenges of preserving a single digital object, but do not deal with software development or scaling to large collections. Much of the document handling software needed is available. It has, however, not yet been selected, adapted, integrated, or
deployed for digital preservation. The daily tools of both information producers and information consumers can be extended to embed preservation packaging without much burdening these users.
We describe a practical strategy for detailed design and implementation. Document handling is intrinsically complicated because of human sensitivity to communication nuances. Our engineering section therefore starts by discussing how project managers can master the many pertinent details.
Chemical information matters: an e-Research perspective on information and data sharing in the chemical sciences
Recently, a number of organisations have called for open access to scientific information and especially to the data obtained from publicly funded research, among which the Royal Society report and the European Commission press release are particularly notable. It has long been accepted that building research on the foundations laid by other scientists is both effective and efficient. Regrettably, some disciplines, chemistry being one, have been slow to recognise the value of sharing and have thus been reluctant to curate their data and information in preparation for exchanging it. The very significant increases in both the volume and the complexity of the datasets produced has encouraged the expansion of e-Research, and stimulated the development of methodologies for managing, organising, and analysing "big data". We review the evolution of cheminformatics, the amalgam of chemistry, computer science, and information technology, and assess the wider e-Science and e-Research perspective. Chemical information does matter, as do matters of communicating data and collaborating with data. For chemistry, unique identifiers, structure representations, and property descriptors are essential to the activities of sharing and exchange. Open science entails the sharing of more than mere facts: for example, the publication of negative outcomes can facilitate better understanding of which synthetic routes to choose, an aspiration of the Dial-a-Molecule Grand Challenge. The protagonists of open notebook science go even further and exchange their thoughts and plans. We consider the concepts of preservation, curation, provenance, discovery, and access in the context of the research lifecycle, and then focus on the role of metadata, particularly the ontologies on which the emerging chemical Semantic Web will depend. Among our conclusions, we present our choice of the "grand challenges" for the preservation and sharing of chemical information
The Research Object Suite of Ontologies: Sharing and Exchanging Research Data and Methods on the Open Web
Research in life sciences is increasingly being conducted in a digital and
online environment. In particular, life scientists have been pioneers in
embracing new computational tools to conduct their investigations. To support
the sharing of digital objects produced during such research investigations, we
have witnessed in the last few years the emergence of specialized repositories,
e.g., DataVerse and FigShare. Such repositories provide users with the means to
share and publish datasets that were used or generated in research
investigations. While these repositories have proven their usefulness,
interpreting and reusing evidence for most research results is a challenging
task. Additional contextual descriptions are needed to understand how those
results were generated and/or the circumstances under which they were
concluded. Because of this, scientists are calling for models that go beyond
the publication of datasets to systematically capture the life cycle of
scientific investigations and provide a single entry point to access the
information about the hypothesis investigated, the datasets used, the
experiments carried out, the results of the experiments, the people involved in
the research, etc. In this paper we present the Research Object (RO) suite of
ontologies, which provide a structured container to encapsulate research data
and methods along with essential metadata descriptions. Research Objects are
portable units that enable the sharing, preservation, interpretation and reuse
of research investigation results. The ontologies we present have been designed
in the light of requirements that we gathered from life scientists. They have
been built upon existing popular vocabularies to facilitate interoperability.
Furthermore, we have developed tools to support the creation and sharing of
Research Objects, thereby promoting and facilitating their adoption.Comment: 20 page
Using Provenance to support Good Laboratory Practice in Grid Environments
Conducting experiments and documenting results is daily business of
scientists. Good and traceable documentation enables other scientists to
confirm procedures and results for increased credibility. Documentation and
scientific conduct are regulated and termed as "good laboratory practice."
Laboratory notebooks are used to record each step in conducting an experiment
and processing data. Originally, these notebooks were paper based. Due to
computerised research systems, acquired data became more elaborate, thus
increasing the need for electronic notebooks with data storage, computational
features and reliable electronic documentation. As a new approach to this, a
scientific data management system (DataFinder) is enhanced with features for
traceable documentation. Provenance recording is used to meet requirements of
traceability, and this information can later be queried for further analysis.
DataFinder has further important features for scientific documentation: It
employs a heterogeneous and distributed data storage concept. This enables
access to different types of data storage systems (e. g. Grid data
infrastructure, file servers). In this chapter we describe a number of building
blocks that are available or close to finished development. These components
are intended for assembling an electronic laboratory notebook for use in Grid
environments, while retaining maximal flexibility on usage scenarios as well as
maximal compatibility overlap towards each other. Through the usage of such a
system, provenance can successfully be used to trace the scientific workflow of
preparation, execution, evaluation, interpretation and archiving of research
data. The reliability of research results increases and the research process
remains transparent to remote research partners.Comment: Book Chapter for "Data Provenance and Data Management for eScience,"
of Studies in Computational Intelligence series, Springer. 25 pages, 8
figure
Sharing and Preserving Computational Analyses for Posterity with encapsulator
Open data and open-source software may be part of the solution to science's
"reproducibility crisis", but they are insufficient to guarantee
reproducibility. Requiring minimal end-user expertise, encapsulator creates a
"time capsule" with reproducible code in a self-contained computational
environment. encapsulator provides end-users with a fully-featured desktop
environment for reproducible research.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure
Rethinking authenticity in digital art preservation
In this paper I am discussing the repositioning of traditional
conservation concepts of historicity, authenticity and versioning
in relation to born digital artworks, upon findings from my
research on preservation of computer-based artifacts. Challenges
for digital art preservation and previous work in this area are
described, followed by an analysis of digital art as a process of
components interaction, as performance and in terms of
instantiations. The concept of dynamic authenticity is proposed,
and it is argued that our approach to digital artworks preservation
should be variable and digital object responsive, with a level of
variability tolerance to match digital art intrinsic variability and
dynamic authenticity
Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Ancient Documentary Artefacts
This tutorial summarises our uses of reflectance transformation imaging in archaeological contexts. It introduces the UK AHRC funded project reflectance Transformation Imaging for Anciant Documentary Artefacts and demonstrates imaging methodologies
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