Migration-by-Emulation Planets Web-Service

The availability of migration tools for older formats is often limited. Thus we suggest a different approach: using the original applications to access the object and transfer the latter into formats which can be accessed in today's environments. The appropriate environment for the digital artefacts could be provided through emulation. With the reproduction of the original environment, a large and diverse set of migration input/output paths becomes available. Working for the Open Planets Project the authors the authors created remotely accessible Web services integrated into the PLANETS testbed. These services demonstrate preservation workflows using migration together with the emulation of original environments

Automation is Documentation: Functional Documentation of Human-Machine Interaction for Future Software Reuse

Preserving software and providing access to obsolete software is necessary and will become even more important for work with any kind of born-digital artifacts. While usability and availability of emulation in digital curation and preservation workflow has improved significantly, productive (re)use of preserved obsolete software is a growing concern, due to a lack of (future) operational knowledge. In this article we describe solutions to automate and document software usage in a way, such that the result is not only instructive but also productive

How Long Can We Build It? Ensuring Usability of a Scientific Code Base

Software and in particular source code became an important component of scientific publications and henceforth is now subject of research data management.  Maintaining source code such that it remains a usable and a valuable scientific contribution is and remains a huge task. Not all code contributions can be actively maintained forever. Eventually, there will be a significant backlog of legacy source-code. In this article we analyse the requirements for applying the concept of long-term reusability to source code. We use simple case study to identify gaps and provide a technical infrastructure based on emulator to support automated builds of historic software in form of source code. &nbsp

Migration-by-Emulation Planets Web-Service

The availability of migration tools for older formats is often limited. Thus we suggest a different approach: using the original applications to access the object and transfer the latter into formats which can be accessed in today's environments. The appropriate environment for the digital artefacts could be provided through emulation. With the reproduction of the original environment, a large and diverse set of migration input/output paths becomes available. Working for the Open Planets Project the authors the authors created remotely accessible Web services integrated into the PLANETS testbed. These services demonstrate preservation workflows using migration together with the emulation of original environments

Are Research Datasets FAIR in the Long Run?

Currently, initiatives in Germany are developing infrastructure to accept and preserve dissertation data together with the dissertation texts (on state level – bwDATA Diss1, on federal level – eDissPlus2). In contrast to specialized data repositories, these services will accept data from all kind of research disciplines. To ensure FAIR data principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016), preservation plans are required, because ensuring accessibility, interoperability and re-usability even for a minimum ten year data redemption period can become a major challenge. Both for longevity and re-usability, file formats matter. In order to ensure access to data, the data’s encoding, i.e. their technical and structural representation in form of file formats, needs to be understood. Hence, due to a fast technical lifecycle, interoperability, re-use and in some cases even accessibility depends on the data’s format and our future ability to parse or render these. This leads to several practical questions regarding quality assurance, potential access options and necessary future preservation steps. In this paper, we analyze datasets from public repositories and apply a file format based long-term preservation risk model to support workflows and services for non-domain specific data repositories. 1 BwDATADiss-bw Data for Dissertations:https://www.alwr-bw.de/kooperationen/bwdatadiss/ 2EDissPlusDFG-Project – Electronic Dissertations Plus:https://www2.hu-berlin.de/edissplus

CiTAR - Preserving Software-based Research

In contrast to books or published articles, pure digital output of research projects is more fragile and, thus, more difficult to preserve and more difficult to be made available and to be reused by a wider research community. Not only does a fast-growing format diversity in research data sets require additional software preservation but also today’s computer assisted research disciplines increasingly devote significant resources into creating new digital resources and software-based methods. In order to adapt FAIR data principles, especially to ensure re-usability of a wide variety of research outputs, novel ways for preservation of software and additional digital resources are required as well as their integration into existing research data management strategies. This article addresses preservation challenges and preservation options of containers and virtual machines to encapsulate software-based research methods as portable and preservable software-based research resources, provides a preservation plan as well as an implementation. &nbsp

Zitierbare wissenschaftliche Methoden

Entwicklung von Infrastruktur und Konzepten zur Unterstützung von "Computational Science

Towards Emulation-as-a-Service: Cloud Services for Versatile Digital Object Access

The changing world of IT services opens the chance to more tightly integrate digital long-term preservation into systems, both for commercial and end users. The emergence of cloud offerings re-centralizes services, and end users interact with them remotely through standardized (web-)client applications on their various devices. This offers the chance to use partially the same concepts and methods to access obsolete computer environments and allows for more sustainable business processes. In order to provide a large variety of user-friendly remote emulation services, especially in combination with authentic performance and user experience, a distributed system model and architecture is required, suitable to run as a cloud service, allowing for the specialization both of memory institutions and third party service providers.The shift of the usually non-trivial task of the emulation of obsolete software environments from the end user to specialized providers can help to simplify digital preservation and access strategies. Besides offering their users better access to their holdings, libraries and archives may gain new business opportunities to offer services to a third party, such as businesses requiring authentic reproduction of digital objects and processes for legal reasons. This paper discusses cloud concepts as the next logical step for accessing original digital material. Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) fills the gap between the successful demonstration of emulation strategies as a long term access strategy and it’s perceived availability and usability. EaaS can build upon the ground of research and prototypical implementations of previous projects, and reuse well established remote access technology.In this article we develop requirements and a system model, suitable for a distributed environment. We will discuss the building blocks of the core services as well as requirements regarding access management. Finally, we will try to present a business model and estimate costs to implement and run such a service. The implementations of EaaS will influence future preservation planning in memory institutions, as it shifts the focus on object access workflows

Automation of Flexible Migration Workflows

Many digital preservation scenarios are based on the migration strategy, which itself is heavily tool-dependent. For popular, well-defined and often open file formats – e.g., digital images, such as PNG, GIF, JPEG – a wide range of tools exist. Migration workflows become more difficult with proprietary formats, as used by the several text processing applications becoming available in the last two decades. If a certain file format can not be rendered with actual software, emulation of the original environment remains a valid option. For instance, with the original Lotus AmiPro or Word Perfect, it is not a problem to save an object of this type in ASCII text or Rich Text Format. In specific environments, it is even possible to send the file to a virtual printer, thereby producing a PDF as a migration output. Such manual migration tasks typically involve human interaction, which may be feasible for a small number of objects, but not for larger batches of files.We propose a novel approach using a software-operated VNC abstraction layer in order to replace humans with machine interaction. Emulators or virtualization tools equipped with a VNC interface are very well suited for this approach. But screen, keyboard and mouse interaction is just part of the setup. Furthermore, digital objects need to be transferred into the original environment in order to be extracted after processing. Nevertheless, the complexity of the new generation of migration services is quickly rising; a preservation workflow is now comprised not only of the migration tool itself, but of a complete software and virtual hardware stack with recorded workflows linked to every supported migration scenario. Thus the requirements of OAIS management must include proper software archiving, emulator selection, system image and recording handling. The concept of view-paths could help either to automatically determine the proper pre-configured virtual environment or to set up system images for certain migration workflows. View-paths may rise in demand, as the generation of PDF output files from Word Perfect input could be cached as pre-fabricated emulator system images. The current groundwork provides several possible optimizations, such as using the automation features of the original environments

CiTAR – Citing and Archiving Research

While the institutional introduction of infrastructure for the collection and conservation of primary scientific data is currently under construction or already exists, a parallel problem awareness arises for the associated models and methods, in particular for data evaluation. However, there is hardly any usable infrastructure and service offerings yet. Although the DFG recommendations on "good scientific practice" currently only recommend the retention of primary scientific data, the remainder of the recommendation refers to mandatory records of "materials and methods" that are not only necessary for comprehensible results but also for the publication process. If scientific results are to be reproducible, for example for an independent verification, a reconstruction of the experimental setup is necessary. However, in the digital age, with its extremely short life span (and availability) of hardware and software components, replicating a data processing process that is identical in all components can not be achieved solely on the basis of records. CiTAR (Citing and Archiving Research), a three-year Baden-Württemberg state project, develops infrastructure to support computer assisted research. One major outcome of this project are means to publish, cite and provide long-term access to virtual research environments. The aim of this project is to develop a cooperative, multidisciplinary technical-organizational service in order to support teaching and research in the further development of "good scientific practice". The service should provide data and scientific methods jointly citable and reproducibly in order to meet the requirements of modern journals. CiTAR realizes re-use of research data and long-term availability in terms of a modern research data management. To achieve the project objectives, three of the four bwFor HPC operators have joined forces to prototype a broader scope in the natural sciences, especially the computational and data-intensive scientific disciplines. The developed service provides automated import of virtual machines and popular container formats like Docker and Singularity. CiTAR assigns persistent identifiers to the imported research environments and provides ressources to re-run the archived objects with external data