Assessing digital preservation frameworks: the approach of the SHAMAN project

How can we deliver infrastructure capable of supporting the preservation of digital objects, as well as the services that can be applied to those digital objects, in ways that future unknown systems will understand? A critical problem in developing systems is the process of validating whether the delivered solution effectively reflects the validated requirements. This is a challenge also for the EU-funded SHAMAN project, which aims to develop an integrated preservation framework using grid-technologies for distributed networks of digital preservation systems, for managing the storage, access, presentation, and manipulation of digital objects over time. Recognising this, the project team ensured that alongside the user requirements an assessment framework was developed. This paper presents the assessment of the SHAMAN demonstrators for the memory institution, industrial design and engineering and eScience domains, from the point of view of user’s needs and fitness for purpose. An innovative synergistic use of TRAC criteria, DRAMBORA risk registry and mitigation strategies, iRODS rules and information system models requirements has been designed, with the underlying goal to define associated policies, rules and state information, and make them wherever possible machine-encodable and enforceable. The described assessment framework can be valuable not only for the implementers of this project preservation framework, but for the wider digital preservation community, because it provides a holistic approach to assessing and validating the preservation of digital libraries, digital repositories and data centres

Towards an open repository environment

Repositories used to be fairly monolithic systems, with a single object store, a tailored content model, and a dedicated application on top. First steps for searching across repositories (e.g. Z39.50, first drafted in 1988; OAI-PMH for content aggregation, first released 2001) are an exception to this. However, we are still far away from an ”open repository environment“, in which repositories interact on all levels with other agents (e.g. other repositories, added-value services, registries). This paper creates a more fine-grained view on repository federation and analyses existing approaches by decomposing them into a physical, a logical, and a conceptual layer for both the object and the system. Among these attributes, the most evident gap pertains to interaction ”patterns “ between agents. In particular, the notification pattern is more immediate and directed than existing query and harvesting mechanisms, enabling new federation scenarios and laying the grounds for open repository environments. Prototypes of the concepts presented here are being implemented in the scope of the project Dariah, which establishes an e-Infrastructure for the humanities. 1

Assessing digital preservation infrastructures: implementing a framework for library, engineering and eScience organisations

Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent ArchiviNg (SHAMAN) is an EC-funded project, which focuses on the development of an integrated preservation framework. Through grid technologies, the SHAMAN framework promotes a distributed approach in preservation systems, whereby ingest, persistent storage, access, presentation and manipulation of digital information is managed for long-term consumption. In order to understand the ever-evolving requirements for functionality in information systems, the SHAMAN team conducted an in-depth investigation of user needs for preservation solutions. The results were used to inform the development of a corresponding assessment framework. The purpose of the assessment framework is to evaluate the degree that the SHAMAN outputs are consistent with the identified user requirements and to measure the overall success of the project. The SHAMAN outputs are instantiated as functional prototypes that reflect preservation requirements in three distinct domains: memory institutions, industrial design & engineering and e-Science. Following the specifications of the assessment framework, the software artefacts produced by SHAMAN for each prototype must be assessed to validate their conformance with user and system requirements. To this end, a software validation methodology has been devised, which builds on the SHAMAN assessment framework to verify that the SHAMAN software satisfies the reasons for its development. This paper documents the SHAMAN assessment framework and explicates the relationship between assessment and software validation in the SHAMAN project

TextGrid and eHumanities

TextGrid is a new Grid project in the framework of the German D-Grid initiative, with the aim to deploy Grid technologies for humanities scholars working on historical (German) texts. Its two roots, humanities computing and eScience (Grid computing used by research together with modern communication technologies), are the basis for TextGrid to provide pioneer work in eHumanities. After summarizing Humanities Computing and modern network technologies, community expectations in the fields of philological edition and other application areas are set forth, from which functional requirements such as modularity, distribution, etc. are distilled. The first version of the TextGrid architecture was designed in accordance with these requirements, and focuses on openness by standard conformance and encapsulation. It provides storage Grid services via a pure Web Services interface to dedicated Web Services tools for different aspects of text processing, analysis and retrieval. This platform aims to provide easily usable tools for scholars, but also specifies interfaces for external program developers to add functionality. 1

The "in and out" of glucosamine 6-O-sulfation: the 6th sense of heparan sulfate.

International audienceThe biological properties of Heparan sulfate (HS) polysaccharides essentially rely on their ability to bind and modulate a multitude of protein ligands. These interactions involve internal oligosaccharide sequences defined by their sulfation patterns. Amongst these, the 6-O-sulfation of HS contributes significantly to the polysaccharide structural diversity and is critically involved in the binding of many proteins. HS 6-O-sulfation is catalyzed by 6-O-sulfotransferases (6OSTs) during biosynthesis, and it is further modified by the post-synthetic action of 6-O-endosulfatases (Sulfs), two enzyme families that remain poorly characterized. The aim of the present review is to summarize the contribution of 6-O-sulfates in HS structure/function relationships and to discuss the present knowledge on the complex mechanisms regulating HS 6-O-sulfation